Merena Nguyen:                  So the workshop is working with a modular sofa made by Tom Dixon, and the proposal from IKEA is for us to really take the sofa, and see what we can do with it, and be creative with it. 

Tom Fereday:                        The piece has been designed as an open source product so that the product can be customized and developed into an infinite number of variations.

Angus Easthope:                  We started to have a look at the different provocations that were given to us by IKEA, and we focused on the myth of minimalism.

Laura Touman:                     We wanted to actually challenge this notion, this idea that minimalism means storing all your objects away, hidden from out of sight, out of mind kind of thing. We wanted to encourage people to use their objects to tell a story, a narrative about their life.

Sari Tredinnick:                   The idea that me and my partner have come up with is basically a couch that remembers the user specifically, and so it's similar to a mood ring or a Hypercolor T-shirt. How you sit in it, and then it kind of molds to your body, and that it remembers your marks.

Christine Gough:                So they're taking their ideas, and they're really expanding on them, going way, way, way out there, thinking about different materials, and different concepts and ideas. Sometimes, we at IKEA, we can get locked into our own ideas. We need to collaborate. We need to work with different groups of people, and it's so exciting to work with these young design minds. They have the most amazing ideas, you know? They're in this time at the moment of looking at ideas, researching. 

Laura Touman:                     It's really empowering to be taken so seriously, I think as a student designer, by a company like IKEA. They're actually ready to listen, to answer our questions, to give us advice, and it just really shows that they do trust us as the next generation of designers. 

Merena Nguyen:                  You wouldn't really get the opportunity outside of uni to work with an international designer like Tom Dixon and the global company, IKEA. Like, it's a very cool experience.