2 October 2018
fig.: The carpet 'Still Loading' shows a half-loaded picture of a mountainous region with the signature 'IKEA c/o Virgil Abloh, "Flooring", Älmhult, Sweden, © 2019'. Photo: © IKEA. (Another view can be found at Virgil Abloh's post on Instagram.) Ikea was founded 75 years ago in 1943 in Älmhult (not depicted on the rug). Since 2016, Älmhult is home of the Ikea Museum, located at the building of the very first Ikea store (opened in 1958). The museum houses permanent and temporary exhibitions; currently until March 2019, 'Ikea Hacked' focusing on people's creativity for participating in the design process, for getting interactive and incorporating own ideas into iconic pieces. Even the collaboration between Virgil Abloh and Ikea is based on the idea of democratic design, the transparent process of designing and transformation. (The 1st introduction into the collection happened in April in New York; video.)
fig.: For the 'Life at Home Report 2018', Ikea asked people of all ages about their way of living and desires. The five core needs privacy, security, comfort, ownership, and belonging are universal but change with variables like age, depends on others we live with, or where in the world we are located such as Ikea states at lifeathome.ikea.com/home/. Photo: © IKEA / Lewis Khan. The five values are used for an interactive tool on lifeathome.ikea.com where the mood barometer can be operated anonymously for testing the own feeling of home. After five questions, the result appears as individually generated priority sphere pointing out the five values with mood cloud tendencies and comparison to the overall 'Life at Home' results with additional tips by an expert to enhance the good feeling at home as well as a shareable 'Manifesto' consisting of three mottos. |
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Recently on 29 September, Swedish furnishing brand Ikea presented the first teasers of the collaborative collection 'Markerad' by Virgil Abloh (launch in 2019) in Paris such as 'Still Loading' from the 'Flooring' series, one of in sum four art-rugs which were available in limited editions on that day. Paris was the first city where the 'IKEA x Virgil Abloh' pop-up store opened; three other cities will follow. 
Today, Ikea presented the results of the 'Life at Home' research on desires of people in 22 countries, conducted between March and August 2018. The nationally representative amount of data by more than 22,800 people delivered five core emotional needs connected to living at home: Privacy, security, comfort, ownership, belonging.