IKEA Inspiring Talents

IKEA returns to Madrid Design Festival to create a space to reflect on a current issue: loneliness and young people. How can we improve this reality from a design perspective? Could we design spaces to alleviate this feeling?

Young people and loneliness

To shed light on this complex reality, IKEA has prepared, together with Adhara Research, the study “Youth and Loneliness”, which analyzes how many young people have usually felt alone in the last year, the profile, emotions and sensations experienced by people who feel lonely, spaces in which they have experienced this feeling more and where they consider that the redesign of spaces can be more useful to alleviate the feeling of loneliness.

of young people

17%

have felt alone in the last year

are women

19%

compared to 15% men

most common emotions:

The 3

sadness, insecurity and frustration

One problem, one solution

In this latest edition of IKEA Inspiring Talents, IKEA will organise some design-thinking days to work on this challenge with experts and design students from all over Spain. These multidisciplinary groups, led by Soulsight consultants, will spend four days coming up with design ideas that will contribute to improving this social reality. The winning submission will be replicated in an IKEA store for all those who want to see, first hand, how design can be a tool to strengthen human relationships in different spaces and environments.

A young student alone in their room looking at their notes at the desk.

Experience it first hand

As part of the Madrid Design Festival, throughout the festival, IKEA will have an immersive exhibition about this problem designed by Manuel Delgado, Head of Interior Design Strategy at IKEA Spain at the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (ILE), which you can visit for free between 14–25 February.

A young person sitting on green, black and yellow cushions from the IKEA NYTILLVERKAD collection.

Exhibition location: Institución Libre de Enseñanza, Paseo del General Martínez Campos, 14, 28010, Madrid, Spain.