SPACE10

» see space10.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

SPACE10 was a research lab paid for by IKEA and kept deliberately at arm's length from it. It was set up in 2014 and opened a space in Copenhagen's meatpacking district in November 2015, and for the next eight years it published work on subjects a furniture retailer has no obvious business publishing on.

The output was strange for a corporate lab in that most of it was given away rather than shipped. Flat-pack housing designs, a vertical farming pavilion, open-sourced furniture, and late on some research into what generative AI does inside a home. The lab's job was to look at where living was heading and write it down in public, under a license that let anyone else build it.

Twenty three people worked there at the end. On 1 September 2023 they stopped.

~ the case file ~

~ the brief ~

Co-founder Kaave Pour put it this way when it closed: SPACE10 "was never meant to last and, after a decade working with IKEA, we have achieved what we initially set out to accomplish." Inter IKEA was reorganizing how it handled innovation and the lab did not survive the reorganization, which is the ordinary version of events. The team's version is that the brief had an end date written into it from the beginning.

Both can be true at once. Simon Caspersen, the other co-founder, said innovation "wasn't really on the agenda at IKEA when we first started" and that it is a very different company now. A lab built to put a subject on a company's agenda has a problem the moment the subject is on the agenda, and SPACE10 seems to have seen that about itself earlier than most.

~ the projects ~

The work people still link to comes mostly from the middle years. The Growroom, launched in 2016, was a spherical plywood garden you could cut yourself from seventeen sheets on a CNC mill, released under Creative Commons with the plans free to download. Within weeks of publication people had built them in Helsinki, Rio de Janeiro, Seoul and Sydney. SolarVille was a working model village running a peer-to-peer solar grid, small enough to fit on a table.

None of it was for sale. IKEA funded the lab and let the results out openly, which for a company that size is an unusual habit to sustain for eight years running.

~ the website they left ~

space10.com is still up. Its title tag reads SPACE10, then the years 2015 to 2023, which is a gravestone written in HTML. The site is an archive of the projects, published on the way out alongside the lab's own internal guidelines so somebody else could pick the thread up.

The space10.io version of the domain did not get that treatment and now answers as a for-sale page. The surviving memorial is served off a Vercel deployment belonging to a design studio, which is where the archive of a furniture company's research lab actually lives in 2026.

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