WHAT WOULD IKEA DO?

MAKING ROOM RITUALS IKEA, the world’s leading home-furnishing brand, must continuously understand how everyday life is changing across cultures and generations—not just what people buy, but how they sleep, socialize, store, care, relax, and belong. The challenge is not to predict trends in furniture, but to anticipate profound shifts in the way people live and what home will mean in the next decade.


To meet this challenge, IKEA has built a uniquely human-centered, outside-in approach to strategy. Instead of traditional trend forecasting, it conducts deep ethnographic research through its global Life at Home studies, with researchers living alongside families to observe real behaviors and unmet needs. These insights feed long-term scenarios and speculative product design. IKEA’s philosophy is simple but powerful: external change is the design briefing, and society itself is the research lab. Link to Life at Home report example

FROM FURNITURE TO THE MEANING OF HOME

We all know IKEA as a global furniture giant, but furniture itself is not the starting point of its innovation. IKEA looks beyond products to understand deeper shifts in what house and home mean. Across cultures and generations, people are living smaller, denser, busier lives while simultaneously craving calm, comfort, and a sense of belonging. These are not short-term design trends, but long-term changes in lifestyle and meaning. Because IKEA products are designed to last—not for a single season—the company works with long horizons of ten, twenty, even thirty years. The central question is not “what furniture will people want,” but “how will people live, connect, and feel at home in the future?”

LIFE AT HOME: DEEP ETHNOGRAPHIC INSIGHT

Traditional market data, trend reports, and social media signals offer IKEA little value for these long timelines. Instead, IKEA developed its own research system: Life at Home. This is an ongoing, ethnographic research program in which IKEA follows individuals, couples, and families in their homes over extended periods of time—almost like a documentary. Researchers observe daily routines, emotional shifts, constraints, aspirations, and tensions: how space is used, how people adapt, what frustrates them, and what truly matters. This approach goes far beyond surface-level aesthetics or consumption behavior. It explores how people live together, how relationships evolve, and how cultural and generational differences shape the experience of home. Importantly, IKEA openly shares these insights, reinforcing that this is about understanding life, not chasing trends.

LONG-TERM FORESIGHT AND BETTER WAYS TO LIVE

IKEA does not start from the market, the furniture industry, or design fashion. It starts from everyday life itself. This makes IKEA fundamentally a foresight-driven organization rather than a trend-watching one. Insights from Life at Home studies feed directly into long-term thinking and inspire design teams to build solutions aligned with IKEA’s core mission: creating better ways to live. The real innovation is not faster, cheaper, or more features, but a shift in meaning for the end user. What has changed in how people experience home? What new needs emerge as lifestyles evolve? By focusing on these deeper, systemic and emotional layers, IKEA ensures its products remain relevant long after short-term trends have faded—because they are grounded in how life itself is changing.

Ask yourself:

• If you need to get out of the building, to find spaces of opportunity where you could observe users in their natural habitat. 
Where would you go?

• Imagine and describe a powerful moment in the usage of your product 5-10 years from now?

• What will be the main changes in usage patterns or meaning for the user? What would that mean for your product for service?