Although Ikea is only starting to dabble in smart home tech with light bulbs, speakers, and blinds, the Swedish furniture giant is showing off a vision that’s much more ambitious.
Someday, for instance, you might use augmented reality to visualize how your computer and TV share data with one another, or to look up the environmental impact of all of your gadgets. You might even use spatial audio to designate parts of your home as “silent zones,” or enlist a digital avatar to warn you of potential privacy threats.
To be clear, Ikea isn’t turning any of these ideas into products anytime soon, but it enlisted its innovation research and design lab, Space10, and a group of external designers to come up with them as a way to reflect on what the future holds for smart homes. The first of these “Everyday Experiments” concepts launched last year, and the latest batch focuses on privacy and trust in an effort to explore what a respectfully designed, noninvasive smart home might look like.
“We wanted to go about it where privacy is not a dystopia, and we’re not working at it from a dystopic point of view,” says Tony Gjerlufsen, Space10’s head of technology. “Privacy shouldn’t be a chore either.”
The augmented home
The clearest example is “Invisible Roommates” by designers Nicole He and Eran Hilleli. Using augmented reality, it envisions smart home devices as cute characters that sit next to their real-world counterparts. When those devices communicate with one another, the AR versions represent the flow of data as a trail of paper planes.
A second concept by Field, called “Chain of Traceability,” imagines that household objects would be registered on a blockchain, which would store information about materials, carbon footprint, and production process. The idea would be for users to scan those products with an AI application so they could make more informed purchasing decisions.
From concept to reality
Since these are design concepts rather than working prototypes, there’s no guarantee that Ikea will realize any of them. Still, some of Space10’s ideas do have roots in existing technology.
Georgina McDonald, Space10’s lead design producer, says the goal with these projects is to get people thinking about what’s possible in a way that doesn’t require years of product development. The latest ideas, for instance, were developed over a 9- to 12-week period. (There’s also a chance that Ikea may patent some of the ideas for itself, or use them as inspiration.)
To that end, McDonald would still like to see Space10 and its partner designers push further on the privacy front with future experiments. She notes that none of the current projects touched on whether smart home tech belongs in people’s bathrooms, but that could change next time around.
“It was a really difficult topic,” she says, “because data and ethics play a pretty large role in what’s actually doable in the home and what people are willing to give up.”
As Ikea looks to distinguish itself from Big Tech companies while building a smart home business around its furnishing empire, inevitably it’ll have to answer those questions for itself.