Home Imagination Platform

IKEA's Home Planning North Star set six Big Bets across three areas: one unified planning experience, a connected omni journey, and knowledge & smart guidance. The bets needed evidence. My program grounds them in how people actually imagine their homes: not executing a fixed plan, but looping through a project with ups, downs and second thoughts, using AI and digital tools along the way.

The core question came first: what is imagination in the first place? IKEA is already strong in efficiency-based experiences; the unexplored side is engagement, keeping people imagining.

I designed and lead a connected research program: a knowledge audit of existing customer insight, rolling research that sense-checks the six Big Bets, and specialist-led ethnographic deep dives with households in the middle of a real home project, diverse in composition, life changes and budget. Designers join the fieldwork; insights move through co-design with the HIP team into concept directions, validated on desirability, viability and feasibility. I scoped the program, its timeline and resourcing, and brought in a dedicated design researcher to keep pace.

The direction is set by a manifesto: design for the life that happens in the home, not just the home itself. Where traditional platforms ask how you want your home to look, HIP asks how you want to live. Its north-star experience is mental occupancy, the feeling of already living in a future version of your home: see it, understand it, imagine it, live in it mentally, own it.

Time is the design medium: daily routines, weekly rituals, seasonal changes, family milestones, life transitions. And none of it floats free of the business: every concept is underpinned by the opportunities defined in the HIP business strategy direction.

Nine app-based experience concepts translate the manifesto into product. Designs are in progress; screens and clips will land here.

The project was reframed: not adding more elements to the planning experience, but first understanding what the imagination process is for customers, then designing experiences from it. From there, two directions. The overall HIP business strategy direction, defined together with the business and underpinned by opportunities. And the experience strategy direction, led by design: be relevant to customers' lives through time.

Through time means designing for the rhythms a home actually follows: life changes arriving every year or every few years, seasons and seasonal events, family events happening several times a year, and the monthly family rituals waiting to be redesigned, from game night to friend sleepovers.