The massive Swedish furniture and home improvement brand Ikea links the virtual world with the physical world through its furniture. You may wonder why a furniture company is interested in the NFT world, but it is a simple concept.
The project hopes to lower the amount of furniture consumers throw away to buy new products from Ikea.
This article will examine how Ikea’s Space10 design lab tackles bringing the company’s furniture into the meta world.
Ikea’s Space10 Design Lab
The design lab, Space10, aims to research better ways of living while looking at more sustainable options for furniture or house objects.
The Space10 website states its project goal: “At our core, we prioritize a collaborative approach and strive to surround ourselves with people who are smarter than us. We work with an ever-growing network of forward-thinking specialists and creatives from around the world and publicly share all our research and ideas. Additionally, we regularly host exhibitions, talks, dinners, and screenings to engage with people, provoke imagination, diversify our perspective and advance our mission.”
The idea of the design house looking at linking the virtual and physical world is not a massive leap; in a way, it makes sense. The company already has a technology called spatial computing. This technology allows you to merge the physical and virtual worlds by using the smartphone camera to render furniture into your house. This allows you to see how the table will look in your home before buying it.
The Ikea NFTs
The Swedish company and Space10 have decided to merge the concept of owning the physical furniture and owning an NFT. The two companies vision is to use the NFT as an “amplifier” for holding real-life objects or furniture.
Furniture or objects in this catalog will now provide owners a way to get an NFT by minting the unique code on each piece of furniture. One of this initiative’s key goals is called the Carbon Banks.
The Carbon Banks initiative is to help stop the concept of the “purchase-to-waste” notion Ikea is famous. Ikea furniture has the notion that with each new trend season, you must go out and replace your old furniture with the latest products. This hope is that it will produce less waste and stop customers from overspending money on wasteful ideas and trends.
Each piece of the NFT furniture will be made primarily out of wood. Once someone buys the furniture, they will receive their NFT. The NFT will be a tiny tree in their digital wallet, otherwise known as a sapling. The sapling is the same type of tree from which the furniture is made. The sapling will morph into a big beautiful tree as time goes on.
The Carbon Banks Project
The Carbon Banks initiative is that each piece of furniture has a way to evolve and grow over time. Instead of the object being destroyed or thrown away, the NFT will react if it has been repaired or traded. Therefore the older the piece of furniture is, and how well it has been looked after, the higher value of the NFT will be.
If the owner of one of these NFT furniture sells/trades it, the NFT associated with it will also go with the object. The hope is that the NFTs will prolong the life of these real-life objects instead of the ecological harm they do to the environment if they land in a garbage heap.
