ODENSE - Light & Storage

furniture ikea Multifunctional Furniture Smart Textiles User Centered Design

A multi-functional furniture concept for IKEA

The aim of the project was to explore the capabilities of so-called smart textiles, while establishing clear user needs which these can meet. Based on this, a design proposal for a furniture concept was developed, with the main purpose of offering the client IKEA clearer paths for further research and development on the chosen material.

The brief was translated into 3 main goals:

To meet the project's deadline of 6 months, we opted to tackle the first two goals concurrently.

This would proove useful, as insights gathered from one would direct and enhance the other. Findings from the background research into smart textiles would inform the generation of and trigger materials for the user study, while insights from user's needs would guide our further research into available materials and their capabilities.

We conducted a wide ranging search of smart textiles, diving deep into litterature and research papers. We also tested various smart textiles ourselves to gage their capabilities up close.

We documented our findings using Miro and Coda.io, thus creating a live research wall which we could adapt and organize throughout the project depending on our needs.

It became apparent that smart textiles could be grouped and summed up by their essential features: their input and their output. For instance, a thermochromic textile changes color due to temperature, thus it has an input of temperature, and an output of color. Other textiles can achieve the same output with different inputs, such as electricity or UV-light.

We also found that by pairing together several smart textiles, or by using simple electronics, any combination of input & output could in effect be created. This insight had profound effects on our concurrent user study.

The user study consisted of 3 rounds of interviews, including at-home visits, digital interviews, and co-creative workshops. During interviews we made use of trigger materials, which were designed to ensure that users wouldn't get stuck on a specific smart textile, but rather their general capabilities and potential. We considered their daily routines, and asked them to act them out as they explained.

Besides these qualitative methods, we also relied on publicly provided survey material from IKEA's Voice of the Customer for quantitative data to further bolster our user study.

We found many areas of interest, but as the project went on, we found that the greatest potential for applying smart textile solutions was with being active in the home.

As we narrowed down our interviews to this problem area, we decided we'd focus in on users who weren't active outside the home, namely home exercisers.

By mapping insights and quotes onto a journey map, we found that most of the issues which people faced with regards to being active in the home were concentrated in the Preparation-phase.

Key aspects were making space and equipment storage. Not only did users feel like they lacked space and spent too much time moving furniture out of the way, but having to hide away their exercise equipment also made it more difficult to access when wanting to exercise which ended up being demotivating.

With key issues identified we could proceed with ideation to generate potential smart textile solutions. Besides our own ideation we also infused the users and the expertise available at IKEA by holding ideation workshops. During the workshops we primed the attendees with insights from our user study, as well as with an introduction smart textiles.

Due to the internal nature of these workshops the resulting sketches cannot be shared publicly, but we used the various ideas floated during them to iterate and recombine into our own ideation.

We finally narrowed down the concepts we'd thought of to 3 potential concepts.

Concept A - Exercise Sensing Furniture

Concept A leverages smart textile pressure sensors, along with IoT functionalities to provide users with a seamless exercising experience in the home - using their existing furniture. The sensors would either be integrated into a furniture collection sold at IKEA or sold as a patch which could be applied on the user’s own furniture. This could enable scenarios like:

(a) A user rolling out their yoga mat, causing the TV to immediately turn on with an instructional video at the ready.
(e) Doing dips against a kitchen table, while a smart speaker provides encouragement and counts repetitions.
The app experience could be provided through IKEAs smart home app (b), in which suggestions for sensor placement and exercises could be provided.

As such, users wouldn't have to move furniture away or take out exercise equipment as it would already be present and ready for a workout to begin at any time.

Concept B - Smart Yoga Mat & Stand

Concept B would tackle encouragement by providing subtle exercising reminders, in the form of a smart yoga mat and stand.

The smart stand would tip forward at specific times, offering the opportunity of exercising like a hand reaching out, rather than a blaring notification. The user would then be able to either grab the mat and start exercising, or push it back to snooze. The smart stand would gradually learn when the best times for exercise would be.

In addition, the stand would be paired with a smart yoga mat, made with a combination of illuminating and pressure sensing smart textiles. When on the stand, the mat could act as a simple light, or provide subtle indications of exercise progress. During exercising, the mat could light up with instructions, showing the user how best to approach their workout.

Concept C - Light & Storage

Concept C was born out from further iteration of Concept B. We first considered whether the smart stand could work with an already owned basic yoga mat. During the iteration, the stand eventually morphed into a container, and then a storage solution, which still offered the lighting functionality.

Thus, it would tackle the need to store exercise equipment, while also providing additional functionality in the form of light.

At this point we realized that this concept could serve even more purposes. The unique combination of functionalities - light and storage - meant that this concept could act as a hollow lamp, in which users could store any number of things depending on how it was shaped.

The promise of Concept A’s seamless experience relied heavily on the fact that the pressure sensors would be placed throughout the home, as well as a fairly extensive software experience. Besides the amount of sensors and software development required, the learning curve for the user would be a considerable challenge to tackle.

Concept B was mainly discounted due to the smart yoga mat, which seemed too complex of a product for IKEA. The remaining smart stand would not qualify as a smart textile project.

Concept C was relatively simple, and offered great functionality even in its simplest form. Even without the smart light functionalities, the space saving benefits of being able to store items inside what would otherwise be a single-use piece of furniture (a floor lamp) were huge.

Now, that we'd settled on this concept, we had to clearly define requirement. To do so we went back to our interviewees and workshop participants for a 3rd round of interviews.

Once again using Trigger Materials, we asked them

• What they could imagine storing inside such a solution.

• What it would look like, how it would open, whether they'd want shelves or dividers.

• Whether the light would change depending on what was inside.

We also asked them to act this out in front of various mockups we'd make, to assess the ideal scale of such a product.

The insights gathered from this and the previous round of interviews led us to crafting the following requirements.

Out of all the smart textiles we'd found during our background research, the best fit turned out to be Fiber Optic Textiles.

Fiber optict textiles integrate optical fibers into a textile yarn, creating a textile which can emit light. It does so by bundling together the optical fibers at one or both ends of the textile and linking it to a light source (often an LED), called the illuminator.

We conducted extensive testing to see wether the material could handle our requirements, as well as what could be improved. We took all of this into consideration and formulated our design challenges.

Fiber Orientation

We experimented with various combinations of illuminator placement and fiber directions, all of which provided interesting forms and functions.

The simplest and most durable orientation turned out to be horizontal, as the illuminator(s) could be placed in such a way that not fibers would be taught or stressed exessively.

Form

Throughout the project I iterated on the form to see the various possibilites of openings, base-types, closing mechanisms and more

Eco Design
To ensure that our idea was sound with regards to our sustainability goals, we compared the CO2 emissions and energy consumption required for our concept with that of two pieces of furniture it was aiming to replace: a BILLY bookshelf, and a VIDJA floorlamp.