IKEA + Space10 Introduce Updatables: Intelligent Furniture That Evolves With You

Meet Updatabales, a new species of furniture that evolves with your changing needs to stay relevant and keep its place within the home.

SPACE10, IKEA’s independent research, and design lab introduce Updatables, a project from Everyday Experiments that showcases what would happen if the furniture had the autonomy to improve and evolve in order to extend its life in the home.

Matteo Loglio and Simone Rebaudengo, co-founders of creative studio, envisioned a speculative application that could enable a new sense of intelligence in everyday things. Updatables is a new family of furniture with agency and personality that can tell you when they’re in need of repair or improvement. Instead of sitting silently in the corner, furniture could tell you what it needs to keep its place in the home. In doing so, it would reduce waste and encourage circularity.

“Unfortunately, many objects today are more easily disposed of and replaced than upgraded or downcycled. We feel Updatables can help inspire people to reduce this waste by giving objects a renewed purpose. By also giving agency to the object, it can share its point of view and unlock a new relationship with us – one where nurturing it can allow it to become something else and grow with us,” says Matteo Loglio, co-founder.

You would begin by scanning a room with the application to connect with a piece of furniture. Using AI, the application would give it a voice, enabling it to speak out about its needs and communicate directly with you. Augmented Reality technology would then allow you to visualise a range of possible directions to take when updating it.

For instance, a neglected armchair might ask for additional storage or a reading lamp to encourage you to sit down with a book more often. By visualising the different options, Updatables would spark moments of unexpected interaction, creating a new kind of playful connection with household items and encouraging more circular living.

Updatables aren’t just simple combinations of materials but fully-fledged evolutions of existing IKEA furniture. The application would make use of an evolutionary algorithm–a piece of machine learning code inspired by biological evolution–to generate new elements, adding and swapping different IKEA parts for entirely novel combinations. Over time, your furniture would continuously develop in unexpected ways, modifying further with each “generation” and making every Updatable unique, with its own name, story, and family tree.

As life at home changes, so do our needs. By actively guiding the evolution of your furniture, Updatables would allow you to ensure that things stay relevant over time, reducing the need to throw them away.

With Updatables, when the time finally comes to discard a piece of furniture, it wouldn’t need to go to waste. Instead, its parts could enter the circular ecosystem where others could collect them for their own modifications. By connecting with people in this way and increasing the circularity of these items, sustainability would only increase. Updatables imagine a future where furniture evolves together with other members of the household, creating emotional connections with objects and encouraging a more thoughtful approach towards disposal and waste.

More info: everydayexperiments.com