Milan Design Week has been around for a while IKEAThe preferred stage to step out of the exhibition space and into something altogether more experiential. This year, the brand is back in town with Food for thought– an immersive installation at Spazio Maiocchi, in the Porta Venezia area. Designed by architect Midori Hasuike and spatial planning studio Emerzon, the project brought together five designer-chef duos from around the world, each translating a moment of everyday domestic life into both a fully designed room and an original menu. The result was a participatory space where cooking, eating and sharing a meal became both design and aesthetic – a place to experience democratic design with all the senses.
Yet Food for thought it was more than a facility. It also served as the launching pad for two major product debuts. The first is the world premiere of three tracks from his tenth edition IKEA P.S – a collection that has shaped the brand’s design identity for over three decades and whose return to Milan, after 31 years, is particularly fitting. The second is a preview of two new lamps by a Milanese architect and researcher Raffaella Mangiarotti – Mossplym and Trådnate – sculptural pieces combining Italian Carrara marble, solid oak, steel and brass and nickel details, combining ambient and task lighting into objects with an authentic material presence.
IKEA PS 2026 collection
MOSSPLYM, Raffaella Mangiarotti x IKEA
IKEA PS 2026 collection
IKEA PS 2026 collection
The BILLY Café at Milan Design Week 2026
IKEA PS 2026 collection (3)
Glitch Camp
IKEA at Milan Design Week 2026
A postscript that became a manifesto
The origins of IKEA PS lie in a moment of creative reckoning. By the late 1980s, the furniture brand had drifted – its range had become unrelenting, its identity diminished. The stock market crash of 1987 caused a wider cultural shift and minimalism began to reassert itself throughout the design world. British, Japanese and Italian designers produced understated works in light woods – an aesthetic that read as distinctly Scandinavian. The irony was not lost on those inside IKEA. It was Stockholm-based designer entrepreneur Stefan Ytterborn who put the question directly to Lennart Ekmark, then head of design: Shouldn’t a company with Scandinavian design at its core be part of this conversation?
This challenge sparked a collaboration. Together, they gathered eighteen young Scandinavian designers and gave them a clear brief: to reclaim the company’s roots, distill the essence of Scandinavian simplicity, and do so at a price that is true to IKEA’s founding principles. The collection they created was launched in 1995 at the Salone del Mobile in Milan under the banner of Democratic Design – a term that captured, in just two words, the idea that good form, honest function and accessibility were not competing values but complementary. The name of the collection itself had a calm attitude: PS, as in the postscript, an addition to the standard series – a distinctly Scandinavian nod to irony.
The debut was a critical success and the format proved durable. Over the years, IKEA PS has returned at irregular intervals, each edition shaped by a new theme and a new generation of designers, both Scandinavian and international. From explorations of multi-functionality and sustainable materials to collections designed for urban commuting and independent living, each chapter pushed the brief in a different direction while adhering to the same underlying belief: that well-designed design should be accessible to all.
Playful functionality, thirty years later
Now in its tenth edition, IKEA PS 2026 channels this founding spirit through what the brand describes as “playful functionality” – an approach that combines practical purpose with expressive, unexpected details. Three pieces offer the first glimpse of the new collection: an inflatable armchair, a solid pine rocking bench and a three-way floor lamp. Distinguished in form and material, they share a sensibility that is at once joyful, rooted in utility but unafraid of personality.
“IKEA PS 2026 is about promoting Scandinavian design through playful, expressive simplicity, always based on one ambition: to make bold and forward-thinking design accessible to manysays Maria O’Brian, Creative Leader at IKEA Sweden.More than 30 years after our first PS collection launched here in Milan, we are excited to offer a first look at this tenth edition, presenting three pieces that capture this ambition in its purest form.”
The option to preview the collection in Food for thought it’s not random. Play and food run as parallel threads throughout the exhibition, both treated as languages through which design can engage with the rhythms of everyday domestic life – across cultures, generations and life situations. The three new PS pieces feel completely at home in this context: objects that don’t belong on a pedestal, but in use.
Good design, good practice
Along with the product launches and the creative program, Food for thought it also reflected IKEA’s wider commitments to sustainable living. In partnership with Too Good To Go – the anti-food waste app active in 15 countries since 2018 – visitors were able to save surprise bags filled with unsold food at the end of each day. Etrash, an Italian startup developing smart bins with artificial intelligence designed to support more efficient waste sorting, was also presented at the show.
The courtyard extended the outdoor experience with a saluhall-inspired market featuring a Campagna Amica farmers market by Coldiretti and a selection of recycled pieces made from IKEA fabrics by PRISM, an Italian charity company specializing in socially excluded textiles. In the Food booth, the beloved Hot Dog Extravaganza is back with a daily cover created by the resident chefs – along with a fish finger hot dog and, in a more unexpected twist, a meatball lollipop developed in collaboration with Chupa Chups. The visit concluded at BILLY Café, a library-inspired space where a curated selection of Phaidon cookbooks offers a moment of quiet reflection amid the hustle and bustle of Design Week.
Beyond the Spazio Maiocchi, IKEA extended its presence across the city through its third consecutive collaboration with Glitch Camp, an initiative of Fondazione Francesco Morelli and IED (Istituto Europeo di Design). As in previous years, the brand furnished communal spaces for design students attending Milan Design Week and hosted communal dinners – an initiative that extends the same spirit of openness and connection beyond the main space and into the city itself.
