- [Narrator] This is Ikea's future lab.
It's a space in downtown Copenhagen where researchers
are creating a sustainable future by changing the way
we live, work, and eat.
Space 10 was founded in 2015,
and its aim is to imagine just what the future
may look like.
It works with specialists, experts, and creatives
from around the world to create projects that it hopes
will make the world a better place to live.
Its concepts include futuristic Ikea meatballs made
from insects, lab-grown meat, or food waste
that may become the meatball of tomorrow;
a virtual reality app that lets you place Ikea furniture
in your home before buying it;
even an on-demand driverless cafe, shop, or office
that makes its way to you at the push of a button.
- Ikea's a company that many people around the world,
they know about,
but like any other company, they are extremely keen
on finding new and better ways, more sustainable ways
of creating a better everyday life for people,
and what we basically do is that we are a research and
design lab, and we try to understand where
the world is moving and try to find ways
of making it better, basically.
I think for many people, research is seen as a little boring
and facts and data, and nobody really seems to get super
excited about it.
We try to collaborate not just with data scientists
and researchers and academics, but also with designers
and creatives to translate that into something that people
actually give a damn about.
- [Narrator] Space 10 showed us the project it's currently
working on, a model village that's completely
self-sufficient when it comes to electricity.
- So all the solar panels will be connected to a computer
underneath the houses, and you will be able to see
which houses are selling and which houses are buying power.
- The beauty of this project is also that you can see
that this little village or community would actually
be more a thing were everybody chips in a little bit,
the energy from the community, the money goes back
into the community so you have a more democratized way
of actually distributing and buying energy.
- [Narrator] Space 10's experimentation continues
in its test kitchen where the foods of the future
are dreamt up.
- We do a lot of funny, weird, novel
explorations
within the field of food,
and one big challenge is that we throw
tons of food away each year,
and it's often actually perfectly fine.
One thing I know for sure that a lot of people are throwing
away is spent coffee grounds,
and facts are that when you brew a cup of coffee,
you only use 2 percent of the nutrient that are in there.
We explored a little bit growing mushrooms.
There's no mushrooms yet, but as you can see, the fungus
is kind of growing.
These are for oyster mushrooms,
and then you basically just mix it with the spent
coffee grounds, and then when it turns completely white,
you add another layer of coffee grounds, and then you
just follow the process.
When it hits the surface up here,
you remove these,
the mushroom will start to flower.
There's also these shortbreads with coffee grounds in it.
- [Narrator] Simon showed us how he makes
a dog-less hot dog,
a meat-free recipe that has just as much protein in it
as a normal hot dog.
The hot dog is one of the recipes in
Space 10's new cookbook,
and it uses the blue-green algae spirulina
as a protein source.
Spirulina is one of the fastest-growing organisms
in the world.
It's easy to digest, full of iron, and contains around
60% protein.
The hot dog itself is replaced by a dried and glazed carrot
along with beetroot ketchup.
It's served with hydroponically grown leaves
and salt-and-vinegar-sprinkled insects.
Each element is designed to be sustainable but also tasty.
So what did it actually taste like?
- I think this is probably the most sci-fi thing
that I've ever eaten.
It doesn't taste at all how it looks.
It looks like it'd taste very green, very healthy.
But it's not.
It's just sort of, as you said,
like an explosion of flavors.
They don't taste of that much themselves.
They're kind of slightly nutty.
The salt and vinegar is really nice,
a nice snack on the side.
- [Narrator] Space 10's ideas are experimental,
and you may not be eating an algae hot dog the next time
you visit Ikea, but these projects might just be a look
at the future to come.
[Kaave] It's become very clear that there is no one future.
It's many futures based on
the many people and countries and cultures around the world,
and I think that is,
I think what we will see in the coming years
that we will probably move away from this consolidation
of very few platforms, very few visions of how the world
should be or how we should dress or what we should eat
or what we should say and where we should do it,
towards, you could say a more distributed future
where technology, designs, businesses, societies,
and communities, they will understand that they actually
have the power to do something in their own world,
in their own society, and that will drive
many different developments.