A young woman leaning on her desk in her bedroom while holding a take-away food carton and staring off into the distance.

Co-creation – working with you to develop better products for life at home

At IKEA, we try to understand as much as possible about everyday life. Through co-creation, we invite you to tell us about your struggles and wishes at home, or to share your feedback on some of our ideas. We take what we learn and design new products, make the ones that already exist even better or create stories that inspire you. Curious?

We believe that the best things are those we create together. We want to open up, listen, learn and connect with people throughout the product development process to make sure that we solve the real needs of life at home.

A young woman, a child and a young man, all dressed in pink and yellow, sitting in and reclining against a brown sofa.

So, how do we co-create?

We’re curious by nature and driven by the need to do better. So we try to connect with people in as many ways as possible. We might meet you in an IKEA store in Japan, asking for feedback on a new prototype we’re working on, or we might start a conversation on social media about living with pets. Or we could ask you for your opinions on new product ideas or communication concepts.

Here are a few of the products we’ve created together

EKENABBEN open shelving unit standing against a peach-coloured wall and furnished with a selection of books and boxes. — **EKENABBEN** open shelving unit

“Calling all university students!”

When developing EKENABBEN we asked a bunch of university students from different countries to help us out. And we learnt a lot.

Amongst other things we found out that:

they wanted flexible and adaptable furniture
they wanted furniture that helped them find their stuff fast
they preferred a raw wood frame

Good things to know, right?

HALVVARM food container with lid and divider filled with pasta and vegetables. — **HALVVARM** food container with lid and divider

“Hey there hungry commuters!”

As a part of our On-the-Go project, we wanted to learn more about the needs of commuters who take food with them every day. So we headed to the IKEA store in Malmö, Sweden to pick our customers’ brains.

We learnt that a food container should ideally: