New meals, wheels, a foldable couch: Unique designs from Ikea’s Space10 lab

The unique project has ended, after 10 years, releasing designs to the world: a couch in an envelope; movable cafes; visions for meals and cities of the future.

An interesting experiment has drawn to a close in Denmark. For 10 years, the Swedish-Dutch furniture giant Ikea funded an open-source design laboratory that started out with a simple brief from then-CEO Torbjörn Loof: Where do we go from here?

Couch in an Envelope, a foldable sofa that can be flat-packed and carried around like a giant rectangular shopping bag. (Panter & Tourron)

The “we” wasn’t meant to be Ikea. It was meant to be humans, around the world. Which is why the lab had three ground rules: No Ikea employees in its ranks. No mission to serve the Ikea shopfloor. And an agreement that all blueprints would be open-source.

“No one wanted it to become a secretive place that existed to outdo a competitor,” says lab co-founder and head of communications Simon Caspersen. Loof’s vision was that, eventually, the view of the future that the lab provided would help the company answer a vital question: “How do we remain relevant decades from now?” And it did, pushing the furniture company to adopt augmented reality as a sales tactic, in a partnership with Apple, for instance. But that came later.

In the beginning, Lööf sought out creative strategist and entrepreneur Carla Cammilla Hjort for help. She reached out to Caspersen, a former business partner and documentary filmmaker. They roped in business development strategist Guillaume Charny-Brunet and digital designer Kaave Pour.

“Hjort nudged us to put our wildest dreams in front of Lööf,” Caspersen says. And so, over the years, Space10 churned out recipes for “meatballs of the future”, made using protein-rich bugs; created a visual prototype for a “couch in an envelope” (read on for more on that); and designed a template for a low-cost micro-home that could be made from a single material, and assembled by the owner.

‘Good design starts with asking the right questions,’ says Space10 co-founder Simon Caspersen.

Space10 worked with scientists, architects, artists, designers and students from around the world. They built speculative installations such as Algae Dome, a photo-bioreactor where visitors could see how microalgae was grown as a food substitute, and try free samples of spirulina chips made by the lab.

Each design was meant to be a jumping-off point, to be adapted to local contexts. “We have to get rid of the idea of design as something that’s purely function or aesthetics-oriented. I think good design starts with asking the right questions,” Caspersen says.

Always meant to be temporary, the lab closed in August, releasing a curation of its blueprints on its website (space10.com). Sharing its resources is one of the many ways in which we hope Space10 will live on, Caspersen says. Take a look at some of the lab’s most unusual ideas.

Couch in an Envelope: This couch weighs 10 kg. It can be flat-packed and carried around like a giant rectangular shopping bag. It can be opened up fully to form a cushioned bench, or partly to fit in a cramped space. It is made of lightweight, recycled and recyclable aluminium, cellulose-based fabrics and biodegradable mycelium foam. The speculative design was created with the help of artificial intelligence earlier this year.

Spaces on Wheels: Could vehicles serve a purpose beyond that of transporting people and objects from point A to B? In 2018, Space10 launched a speculative project called Spaces on Wheels that engages visual art and augmented reality to imagine a world in which collections of self-driving cars would serve as cafés, grocery stores or pharmacies.

“We felt that if the cars are fully autonomous, they’re not just cars anymore; they’re architecture on wheels, with potential benefits including better access to healthcare and increased mobility and safety,” Caspersen says.

The lab designed an app that would let people track such pop-ups, and potentially book a slot (meaning that the establishment would then pull up at their doorstep). The idea won at the International Design Awards in 2018.

The Ideal City: Perhaps the lab’s most evocative offering poses the question: What can cities do better? And answers it by drawing on best practices from 53 urban hubs across 30 countries.

The Ideal City: Exploring Urban Futures was published in 2021, in collaboration with Gestalten, Germany, and represents hundreds of conversations with architects, designers, technologists, policy experts and government officials, about things they got right, experiments they’re proud of, times they failed and lessons they learnt.

Innovative approaches detailed in the book include the Qunli stormwater park in Harbin, China, with an outer ring of ponds and a wetland at the centre that acts as a natural sponge for the urban district.

The book eventually spawned an interactive installation titled The Ideal City 2040 that premiered at the Barbican Centre in London, in 2022. Visitors were offered a view of three ideal cities, through a virtual-reality headset. As a narrator detailed the changes each fictional city had effected, the viewer could tour the templates: A coastal city built to a mixed-use plan that allowed residents to meet most of their needs with a 15-minute walk. A solar city attempting to reverse desertification and protect biodiversity in a dry region. And a garden city, built around vast wetlands and parks, with residents using community gardens to grow food.

The book, with its also-evocative real-world examples, is available on gestalten.com.