Kalyn Nakano

IKEA

 
 

IKEA Table for Living — Building an interactive computer vision prototype for the Milan Furniture Festival + World Expo

 

CHALLENGE

Bring to life the experience of how people will interact with their food and kitchens by the year 2025 through an interactive prototype.

 

CLIENT

IKEA

YEAR

2015

 
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IKEA asked IDEO London and a group of students from Lund and Eindhoven universities to explore the social, technological, and demographic forces that will impact how we behave around food in 2025. After researching people’s attitudes and ideas about cooking and eating, the team designed a series of concept kitchen products.
 

To bring these future concepts to the present day, IKEA asked IDEO to design and build a full-size concept kitchen for 250,000 visitors to test out during the Salone Del Mobile in Milan and a six-month stint at EXPO Milano.
 

The centerpiece of the concept kitchen was the Table for Living, a cooking and work surface that recognizes the foods you place on it and projects customized recipes and cooking tips right onto the tabletop.

 
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As a software designer on the project, I was responsible for bringing this concept to life with an interactive prototype that could work reliably for more than six months. Our approach was to build a simplified version of CV (using openFrameworks and openCV) to recognize a fixed set of ingredients that users could play with on the table.

 
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Taking this from concept video to functional prototype, introduced several interaction design questions into the software development process. Quickly into building, it became clear that the concept video was really just a starting point. Testing all the different arrangements and interactions challenged initial designs and software implementation methods, and forced us to think more closely about transitions and thresholds. 

 
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Doing so, however was a great example of building to learn. Creating a live prototype allowed us to solve for challenges that wouldn't normally come up in a screen-based prototype. It generated a new excitement for designing dynamic and thoughtful off-screen experiences, and watching people's reaction to it was inspiring. After setting up the table in Milan, we came in the next morning and found construction workers playing with it, saying "bellissima!"

 
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