What does the future look like? That’s a difficult question to answer. What is probably easier to answer is this: what are our kitchens and living spaces going to look like in ten years’ time?
IKEA tried to answer this question with Concept Kitchen 2025, an initiative that brought together IDEO (an innovation and design firm) and the minds of students from two universities — School of Industrial Design at the Ingvar Kamprad Design Centre at Lund University, and the Industrial Design department at Eindhoven University of Technology — to explore what the future holds for us, and how our products will help us live a sustainable life at home.
And part of this initiative is The Table Of Living, an ordinary-looking kitchen table that can do pretty much anything and everything, from weighing food products, providing detailed steps to cooking, making recipe suggestions based on the food you have available in your kitchen, to warming up or cooking food on its surface.
2025 better come soon.
The table also includes induction charging for devices — something that IKEA is already building into its furniture — and will be launching in select countries this year.
The concept is made possible with a camera and lights placed overhead, and with integration into a large database of information, much like the Internet of Things. The conceptualised table took into account possible challenges we may face in ten years’ time, such as having scarce food and water, having smaller homes in urban areas, and even living detached lives from your family within the same home. The kitchen is being reinvented to reduce wastage and space needed to function, and to once again become the heart of the home where family can come together and spend time together.
While the thought of a restricted life living with drought and scarcity is terrifying, we can at least take comfort in the knowledge that technology will be keeping up with us and producing incredible products like this that we can look forward to.