Omfamn: IKEA Corporate Project

reimagining the soon-to-be empty nester experience

Stanford University, ME216A: Needfinding, 4 week team project

The Problem

As kids, the transition to college is a well-documented one. You can find countless blog posts, videos, and articles covering every topic from what to major in to exactly how many pairs of socks you need to bring. Everyone knows that going to college can be exciting, nerve-wracking, and confusing. Moving out of the house is an ultimate test of independence, an acknowledgement of the fact that you’ve grown up. But what about the other side?

For parents and caregivers, children moving out can often be just as big of a transition. They deal with all these same feelings of fear and excitement, but instead of heading somewhere new for their next chapter, they stay behind. We take our favorite clothes, and they’re left with our empty beds.

So how can we help parents through this transitionary period?

User Research

We talked with parents in different stages of this transition — some had already sent kids to college, while for others it was their first. Some were becoming empty nesters within the next year; others still had a couple years to go. Each story we heard helped us to build an understanding of what it is like to be a parent during this time.

Data Synthesis

After interviewing with many different parents, we gathered all of our data for analysis.

We decided to put the childhood objects we saw into a framework centered around the actions parents took with them: whether they wanted to keep or get rid of them, and whether they currently display or hide them.

The top left quadrant, trophies, is most obvious — parents display objects they want to keep. The inverse, clutter, is also pretty expected. 

But look where the piano fell, in heirlooms — it’s an object the parents clearly expressed wanting to get rid of and yet takes center stage in their living room. The heirlooms quadrant holds items that the parents feel like they should cherish, yet don’t actually bring them value. 

Mike’s paintings fell in the diagonal quadrant, they’re trinkets: objects that he clearly yearns to keep, but are hidden in the basement. Trinkets are sentimental items that parents keep despite the actual object being less meaningful. These two quadrants hold items that create a tension for the parents — there is a conflict between the value these items themselves have versus the memories they hold.

Now, their kids are getting ready to leave and parents have to start making decisions about where the items left behind will or will not live in their home. 

Jim’s wife, Anne, said these decisions will be difficult because her kids’ “needs and concerns will still take up space” even after they move out. Because of the weight that parents feel these objects carry, they feel like the decisions they make on what they do with those objects shows how much they care about that memory. Even if they don’t want childhood paintings or a piano -- to the parents it feels like getting rid of them would be to get rid of the memories those items held. 

For the first time in years, parents will have more freedom with what to do with the spaces that their children no longer occupy, and what memories are represented in their home. How do they turn a once shared space into one for themselves while honoring the memories it housed?

Right now, parents face a mostly binary decision with each item in their home: either keep it, or get rid of it, which can feel a bit extreme.

Needs

So what do empty nester parents need? We created a needs hierarchy to lay out the different needs of parents during this time.

Design Principles

From these needs, we developed the following design principles:

1. Empower parents to declutter or get rid of things to support parents’ newfound autonomy in their own home.

2. Utilize imagery or objects from childhood to encapsulate memories in a new product so that parents can cherish the memories they share with their children.

3. Give new functionality to old things to lessen the parent’s stress of deciding which of their child’s items to throw away.

Our Solution

Our solution, Omfamn (“embrace” in Swedish), provides a middleground: a package of add-on planks, pegs, and screws customized to turn a child’s old IKEA IDANÄS bed frame into a bookshelf. It retains the original visual of the bed frame by stacking the headboard and footboard.

Omfamn empowers parents to change their home and items in it to reclaim their newfound autonomy and space.  

The new bookshelf gives additional functionality to an old item to lessen parents’ stress of deciding which of their child’s items to throw away. By doing so, we can move a child’s twin bed, which would normally occupy the heirlooms quadrant like the piano, into the trophies quadrant with other treasured and displayed items. Making it easy for parents to get rid of the additional slats adds purpose to decluttering as well. 

While Omfamn was born out of the stories we heard from parents with children going to college, this concept of sustainable multi-stage, multi-use furniture addresses the needs of parents who are transitioning their homes throughout their children’s lives. When their kids move out is just one of the more intense transitions. By focusing on this niche, IKEA can not only ensure that investments a parent makes in their children’s spaces are investments in their own, but also invest in their company's value of caring for people and the planet.