Could A Couch Fit Into An Envelope? How Generative AI Helped Designers Solve An Impossible Challenge

It started with a prompt to Chat GPT: can a couch fit into an envelope? Short answer: no.

From there, a collaborative team of designers from Copenhagen-based design lab Space10 (IKEA's product design partner) and Swiss design firm Panter&Tourron started putting "hundreds" of prompts into text-to-image generative AI tools. The goal was to come up with a viable flat pack design for a couch that was portable. The process that project lead Georgina McDonald describes offers some good insight for how generative AI really works:

"As soon as we removed the word couch and started looking at [terms like] platform, lightweight, tent, hammock, bed, and surface, we started to get closer to what we wanted ... a key moment in the design phase was the inclusion of the term 'conversation pit' in the AI prompt, which led to the benchlike and more social shape of the final design."

This was a design challenge the team had been working on since 2019. Using generative AI helped them uncover a key insight (people could face one another instead of staring straight ahead) that eventually led to the successful design.

Was it the AI that came up with the idea, or the humans on the team? Or both? Regardless of the answer, this is what the future of generative AI is going to look like. Collaboration.