Ikea is one of those companies that’s so ubiquitous, buying its products are a rite of passage: You move into an apartment, purchase your first Ikea furniture, and get into your first major fight with your partner.
But that might not always be the case. Cities are growing and living spaces are shrinking. Perhaps in the future, people won’t buy their very own Hemnes bed and Billy bookshelf. Instead, they’ll move into communal homes where furniture is passed down from former residents to new ones–something that’s already happening. With the number of people buying homes on the decline, coliving houses are springing up in metropolitan areas all over the world, from New York and San Francisco to Amsterdam and Tokyo.
To do so, Space10, the company’s future living research lab, has created a survey to gather information about how people today think about coliving. Designed by the New York-based firm Anton & Irene, the survey–called Shared House 2030–presents itself as an “application” for a coliving house in 2030. You input your preferences–what size of house you’d want, whether the house should be furnished, what kinds of people should live there–like you might if searching for an actual shared house to live in. Then the survey shows you how other people responded.
Pereyra says that Space10 reached out to her after the project went viral and commissioned the Shared House 2030 project, making the Ikea survey something of a sequel to the original documentary. The two share the same aesthetic, which Pereyra says is inspired by classic 1980s Dutch graphic design and a board game she used to play as a child.
While the data is far from scientific–it’s somewhat self-selecting in that people who are interested in coliving are more likely to participate and there were no controls over demographics–it does gesture toward what people are looking for from coliving spaces. The results show that of the 6,300 survey respondents who’ve filled it out since it launched in mid-November, people tend to prefer to live in the city, want to live with single men, women, and couples in their house (no small children, seniors, teenagers, or single parents, please), would want common space to be furnished while private spaces remain unfurnished, and want clear delineations between private and shared spaces, like keeping all bedrooms private and off-limits, while work spaces and a communal kitchen are for everyone.
“Right now we are collecting information and mapping what is happening, and see what could be relevant in this aspect for us,” he says. “Then after a while we can [draw] some conclusions.”
Nilsson says the survey is part of a larger exploration into people’s living situations, one that will look into the struggles that people have when they move from one country to another, the pressures students have to find affordable housing, and the challenges the elderly face in the current care system. This will include research as well as more formal surveys, workshops, and talks.
The survey points to Ikea’s bigger goal: to not assume that the home will continue to stay the same in a changing world.
“Our vision is to sell furniture, and sell more than we’re selling today. But that would be easy,” says Nilsson. “We have a bigger ambition than that.”