What does SPACE 10, the lab that developed eight meatballs for IKEA, actually do?

An innovation lab that refuses to be called an “innovation lab.”

IKEA's innovation lab SPACE 10 came out of a six-hour meeting.

In 2012, the Copenhagen creative studio Rebel Agency helped IKEA design the BRÅKIG furniture collection. The line sold very well after launch, which earned Rebel Agency's founder and CEO Carla Cammilla Hjort and its PR director Simon Caspersen a seat at a meeting with IKEA's CEO to discuss what came next.

Rebel Agency was spending six months of every year working with IKEA at the time, and it was during that work that they hit on an arrangement unlike the usual client-and-agency deal: “IKEA would cover the basic cost of running a space, and let us throw ourselves fully into thinking about how IKEA would connect with the world 10 or 20 years from now.”

IKEA agreed. SPACE 10 opened in November 2015.

Guillaume Charny Brunet, SPACE 10's chief creative officer, told QDaily that they don't want the place he runs labeled an “IKEA lab” or an “innovation lab.”

SPACE is the 1,000 square meters they occupy, and also a space for thinking. The 10 is No. 10 Flæsketorvet in Copenhagen, but it can also be split into 1 and 0: “When you're creating in the digital world, 1 and 0 are all you need.”

It is no surprise that IKEA would open a lab like this. To stay competitive, plenty of large companies build something similar and put it to work on things that cannot be realized right away — Google's X lab, with its nanoparticle pills and artificial skin, or the robotics lab at Autodesk, the 3D modeling software company.

Just as Hjort and her colleagues proposed at the start, SPACE 10 is not there to make products that can go straight into commercial use; you will not see the prototypes they build in an IKEA catalogue in the next few years. IKEA pays SPACE 10's bills and is the first to see what comes out, but IKEA does not set the direction of the research.

IKEA says its mission is “to create a better everyday life for the many people.” SPACE 10 was founded, in the same spirit, “to create a better, more meaningful and more sustainable everyday life for the many people.”

For IKEA, SPACE 10 is an addition to the teams already working on innovation and on customer needs, offering “a slightly different path to innovation.” And SPACE 10 has no plans to make anything that could go on sale next year: “the goods that appear in IKEA's catalogues and stores have never included, and will not include, products designed by SPACE 10.”

SPACE 10 is itself a prototype, and it keeps getting adjusted

The people who started SPACE 10 first pictured it running like a magazine: three-month cycles, outsiders brought in, every resource thrown at a single project to solve one problem. Their first project, Fresh Living Lab, quickly produced a batch of concept products meant to improve human health and the urban environment and to cut energy use.

As Brunet sees it, SPACE 10 “is one big prototype” in itself, and it is still being adjusted today.

Right after that first project, they found the original method did not suit them: “We needed more time, more strength, a more complex structure.” So after talking it through with IKEA, SPACE 10 went from one project at a time to several labs running in parallel, and picked the fields it would concentrate on for now.

In talks and in interviews, SPACE 10's people can rattle off a string of figures about the challenges the world faces: that the global population will reach 10 billion by 2050, that in the next 15 years humanity will need 35% more food than it does now. The lab also lists those figures on the page of its website that sets out its vision, and the questions it works on follow directly from them.

For that purpose SPACE 10 set up four labs — The Farm, Do You Speak Human, Possible Cities and Build with Spaces — covering food, artificial intelligence, urban planning and digital architecture, with all sorts of individual projects under each one.

IKEA does not ask SPACE 10 for especially practical products, but that does not mean the team gets to produce nothing. Once a project's theme is fixed, its members start developing and building prototypes, testing and adjusting them, then talking with IKEA's team and testing whether the idea makes commercial sense.

The practice of bringing in outsiders survived. When SPACE 10 decides it needs help from particular experts, it goes looking for them and invites them to work there for one to six months; SPACE 10 calls them residents, and the program Residencies. They come from all sorts of fields — The Farm alone has designers, architects, bioengineers and chefs.

Staff and residents are now about equal in number, roughly 15 and 12, and many of them are “intensely curious,” so they work on several projects at once.

“I no longer believe a small team in a secret lab can make something that changes the world,” Brunet said. A lab built to take on global challenges, he argues, cannot work the way some large companies do, with a few people shutting the door and experimenting with no contact outside. It has to lean on experts around the world, and Residencies lets SPACE 10 “take these people in very quickly.”

When they study food, what are they actually studying?

Asked which of the four labs' fields he would most like people to watch, Brunet first said all of these challenges matter, then pointed to population growth and the rise of the middle class, which together will create enormous demand for food.

Food is, to a degree, the challenge that draws the widest public attention, since it is something most people think about. In fiscal 2016, IKEA's food business brought in €1.7 billion (about 13.063 billion yuan) in sales, and the first project at The Farm, Tomorrow's Meatball, took on exactly that: the meatball, the signature dish of IKEA's restaurants.

We have written before about the eight meatballs SPACE 10 designed. The meatball became the center of the project because of its iconic status and because it turns up in the food cultures of so many countries. In the eight you can see where the food industry is trying to innovate and how technology and food are being put together — the Artificial Meat Ball, the 3D Printed Ball, the Crispy Bug Ball.

IKEA did launch a veggie meatball in 2015, but for now it has no plans to put these harder-to-swallow meatballs on its restaurant menus. That is not the point for SPACE 10 anyway. What the team wants is for the world to notice one thing: IKEA is watching these trends.

“We can't tell the world that IKEA is going to make these [meatballs], but we want the world to know that it was IKEA that let us put out things this cool, or bring people this good together to work on food projects,” Brunet said.

A year and a half in, SPACE 10 is still exploring. If you follow what is happening in the food industry, you may notice that The Farm has yet to show anything that counts as a breakthrough. Tomorrow's Meatball, the DIY healthy snack SpaceBar, The Growroom — a structure for growing plants in cities — all of them still sit inside territory where plenty of others have already delivered results.

Brunet treats what The Farm has published so far as a tool for pulling in people who never paid attention to food, and he also hopes it will be the starting point for conversations with experts in the field: “They're not solutions. They're a way to start a conversation.”

The Growroom, finished at the end of last year, did in fact bring SPACE 10 a response it had not expected. Working with the Danish architects Mads-Ulrik Husum and Sine Lindholm, the interaction designer Thomas Sandahl Christensen and the gardener Sebastian Dragelykke, the lab built a structure that lets city residents grow all sorts of crops in urban space, hoping to get people arguing about how to grow food as locally as possible, above all in cities.

Once The Growroom went on show, inquiries arrived from all over the world, many of them from people who wanted to buy one the way they buy IKEA furniture. That was something the team had never imagined.

SPACE 10 did not read it as an opening for commercial production either: “it makes no sense to ship it across oceans and continents in the name of promoting local food production.” After talking it over with the two architects, SPACE 10 decided to open-source The Growroom and publish detailed drawings, so that anyone who wants one can take them to a factory with CNC machining and have the parts cut and assembled. All the builder has to do is credit the original creators and share the results with SPACE 10.

The Farm is still running all kinds of projects — how to use AI to grow enough vegetables in the lab to feed everyone at SPACE 10, for instance, or the Dogless Hotdog, a hot dog with no meat that still carries a decent amount of protein.

Brunet expects SPACE 10 to keep growing and to reach beyond Copenhagen — a SPACE 10 in the United States, one in China, same method, different teams. “There's no way we can sit in Copenhagen and think through the challenges the whole world faces.”

Q = QDaily

G = Guillaume Charny Brunet

Q: As a lab for the future of everyday life, how do you keep track of how the world is changing?

G: We have three sources.

The first is that Inter IKEA Systems has a dedicated team, Consumer and Business Intelligence, that analyzes changes in the world at the micro level — they call these microtrends. Another source is talking to Inter IKEA Systems directly. They have told us, for instance, that no one knows how to get to a more circular economy, but that we are very interested in it, in improving things and moving in that direction.

Everyone at SPACE 10 does research, observes, investigates — watching for what we call weak signals, the trends, movements and opportunities we find under way in small pockets. We keep an eye on the venture firms making big bets in various areas, and we watch through keywords, media and public engagement, using every resource of that kind to stay as current and as broad as we can.

Q: How do you make sure you are heading in the right direction?

G: What is the right direction? Right for whom? So far our work is at a very early stage. We share our ideas with people and see whether they like them. If they don't, we see it right away.

When that happens, we decide to go in another direction, or to put in more resources and try once or twice more. But if, step by step, a lot of people react well at every stage, that is how we lower the risk — instead of pouring resources into a secret lab and then announcing something irrelevant.

Cover image: SPACE 10

In-text images from IKEA, Bits x Bites, SPACE 10 and Twitter.