Space10 Uses AI To Re-Imagine IKEA Furniture [Video]

In just a few short months, generative AI platforms have taken the world by storm, leading a technological and design revolution that promises new ways of creating.

In a new project, IKEA’s research and design lab SPACE10 worked with video journalist Joss Fong and designer Áron Filkey to imagine a new speculative line of IKEA furniture through the use of AI, drawing on the style of past IKEA catalogs. By teaching a text-to-image model of what IKEA furniture looked like in the 1970s and 1980s, the project allows for a unique collaboration with designers from the past to imagine new, vintage-inspired items for the future.

How:

Fong and Filkey created two image datasets: one containing IKEA catalog photos from the 1970s, and one containing IKEA catalog photos from the 1980s. Using DreamBooth, they “fine-tuned” the open-source Stable Diffusion image-generation model. The result was two new models that each learned a keyword …