This is the latest installment of our Core77 Questionnaire. Previously, we talked to the Italian designer Luca Nichetto.
Name: Mia Lundström
Occupation: Creative director, IKEA Sweden
Location: Älmhult, Sweeden
Current projects: I’m working with long-term home-furnishing priorities, in terms of how people live their everyday lives—their needs and their frustrations and the opportunities and so on. That’s a quite big project that goes on all the time, but it needs to be updated and we need to have a product range for it and we need to make sure that the people developing and designing IKEA concepts really, truly understand the latest trends in society, so that we can cater toward them in a good way.
I’m also working quite a lot on some questions around the meeting with the customers in our stores. We want to create a much more vital interaction; we feel that we have been a little bit slow on the uptake with our showrooms and the impression of home-furnishing—that IKEA is a creative company and that we are in tune with society and trends and all that.
Mission: To create a better everyday life for the many people
A cabinet and pendant lamp from IKEA’s new PS 2014 collection. (Last March, we interviewed six of the young designers behind the collection.)
When did you decide to pursue a career in design? Well, I’m not working with product design specifically—I’m working with, in a sense, designing the concept of home furnishing. And I’ve always been very interested in this. I started in the retail sector and one thing sort of led to another.
Education: I would say life and experience is my main education. Other than that, I went to Swedish primary and high school and took a couple of courses at art and design school. But no university; I have gone to IKEA university.
First design job: To design the bedroom department of a store in Stockholm
Who is your design hero? There are many. Estrid Ericson and Josef Frank are, of course, two of my favorites. I also admire some of the Danish and Finnish designers like Arne Jacobsen and Alvar Aalto. Among contemporary designers, I like Paola Navone and Ilse Crawford. There are a lot of women in my favorites, and I think that we sometimes have too few women in design. I could name many, many more.
Also from the PS 2014 collection: a wardrobe by matali crasset (left) and a storage table by Rich Brilliant Willing. (Read more about their contributions here.)
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