IKEA Makes Furniture Smarter with Smart Kitchens

The Swedish savior brand for divorced men and college kids is bringing flat packed microhousing into the IoT. IKEA started its development with wireless smartphone charging in some of its furniture, and in an announcement this week, the brand unveiled a series of future kitchen ideas that include networked devices, shelves that act as refrigerators, tabletops that cook, and instant food delivery by drone.

The company showed off its design proposals at the 2015 Milan Design Week in Italy, where it built a pop-up shop to display its 2025 kitchen with IDEO, a design and consulting firm, design students at Lund University in Sweden and Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands.

There was a kitchen table that helped you make dinner by telling you if you’re missing ingredients or serve up a recipe for what you do have. Which isn’t condescending at all. If anything is missing from the desired recipe, a drone will arrive and bomb your house with corn or Doritos or Gordon Ramsey. The table will also charge your phone while the protein ingredients slowly defrost until your drone delivery arrives.

Your fridge won’t get left out, either. Shelves use induction technology to detect if your food is going bad and tell you to eat it. Or, if it’s an evil fridge, wait until it has gone bad in an attempt to poison you.

Your compost heap will be obsolete as leftover food will simply get processed into pucks of dried food clumps, with the extracted liquid used to water your now totally gross plants.

Teasing aside, this could all be pretty cool, if IKEA can figure out how to make it work.