Tech

Ikea's incredibly futuristic table replaces your stove, your cookbook, and your brain

Drake Baer

2015-09-14T14:51:00Z

The table — yes, the humble table — is the future of the home.

That's according to Marcus Engman, Ikea's head of design.

"Personally, I do believe that the table is going to be extremely important for the future," Engman says. "That's going to be the masterpiece of the home. It used to be, hundreds of years ago, that was the big piece."

Ikea's plans for the table are, to say the least, ambitious. For EXPO Milano 2015, the company previewed a concept table called the Table For Living, which tells you what you can make with various ingredients and heats your food, no stove required.

Ikea created the prototype with the help of the global design consultancy Ideo, which recently gave us a behind-the-scenes look at how the table was brought into the world.

Here's how it happened.

Standing in Ikea's booth at the EXPO Milano 2015 design festival, the table looks unassuming.

welcome to 2025 this is what your kitchen looks like

"Ikea came to Ideo to help explore behaviors around food and how that would impact designing the kitchen of 2025," says Ideo design director Juho Parviainen. "At the outset, the team thought about the kitchen from the perspective of designing for behaviors, not just things." Below is a clip from the concept video.

The design team — along with members from Ikea, Ideo, Lund University, and Eindhoven University of Technology — wanted to create a table that would help people become more confident cooks and lead more sustainable lives.

Concept Kitchen_Courtesy of IKEA and IDEO_2

To do that, it would serve not only as a place-setting surface, but also a cooking surface. Not only that, but the table would recognize the ingredients you put on it, and walk you through the cooking process.

Concept Kitchen_Courtesy of IKEA and IDEO_1.JPG

This would require two main technologies: induction heating to cook with wood ...

... and computer vision to recognize ingredients.

The induction technology could keep your coffee hot — and even charge your phone, which Ikea products like the Riggad Lamp already do.

"We explored several options, but computer vision provided the right levels of accuracy and resolution for us to prototype and iterate on a design for different off-screen behaviors," says Ideo interaction designer Kalyn Nakano. This is what the computer vision software looks like.

Concept Kitchen_Courtesy of IKEA and IDEO_3

The prototype only had three ingredients, each readily distinguishable by color — a red tomato, a green head of broccoli, and rice in a blue bowl.

for tiny apartment dwellers the table eliminates the need for a stove hidden induction coils heat the inside of pots and pans rather than the surface to make the table amenable to working cooking or eating

"We thought we would try to do something similar with the Table for Living to bring cooking back to the center of the kitchen again," Parviainen says.

Concept Kitchen_Courtesy of IKEA and IDEO_7

Plus cooking on wood "turns an everyday, mundane moment into something that feels like magic," he says. Between the concept video and the prototype, it's magical indeed.

Design