Ikea’s newest collection is designed to move. And move. And move.

These 13 home furnishings were inspired by the lived reality of young urban dwellers who regularly find themselves moving to new apartments, neighborhoods, cities, or countries. To ease that nomadic instability, Ikea’s designers have come up with furniture, storage pieces, and even a plant pot that are all intended to add some sense of permanence to a life on the move while also being easy to pick up and relocate.

One item is a foldable mattress that can be strapped on and carried like a backpack. Another is a side table that flattens and transforms its base into a carrying handle. Another is a storage-focused rework of the classic polyester Ikea shopping bag that’s been outfitted with wheels for easy transport. Blending frugality and practicality, they all have a multipurpose spirit and a recognition that precarity is the economic reality for many young people.

The idea to focus on this particular demographic formed in 2024. “When it comes to young people in transient living situations, we felt there was more to do,” says Ina Tidbeck Sjöblom, range leader at Ikea of Sweden, who spearheaded the collection. “There are products for them at Ikea, but we didn’t really feel that we could support this customer group.”

Before Ikea’s designers began designing, they decided they needed to better understand their target market, so they took a research trip to London and visited the homes of 20- to 28-year-olds. They met young people who had grown accustomed to moving around, either by choice or by economic circumstance, piling their belongings into the back of an Uber or borrowing skateboards to roll heavy items around the block to their next temporary home.

On this trip, Ikea brought along two design interns. “They were, of course, the target group themselves,” Sjöblom says. “We really embraced having them with us because they are who we are addressing.”

Those interns ended up designing a few of the pieces in the collection, including a compact and versatile book holder and an assembly-free folding desk with a built-in carrying handle.

Ikea’s designers also took direct cues from the London residents they met. The team visited a variety of living spaces and conducted interviews to better understand what it’s like to move over and over again, and how that affects the way someone thinks about their space.

“The first thing is that we shouldn’t romanticize this,” Sjöblom says. “This is not fun. You wish you could live in one place longer and that you can keep your stuff, but it’s not possible. So you have this nomadic life and you have to make it work and it has to feel like a real home.”

Sjöblom says some big takeaways were that young urbanites want to be able to show their personality in their rooms, no matter where they are or how often those rooms change. And they want the small number of things they keep from move to move to be durable and versatile.

For example, one resident the designers met had a prized wooden desk that could easily fold and be carried from place to place. That directly inspired the folding desk designed by Constance Thiessoz, who was an intern during the collection’s development.

Another resident had such fondness for her houseplants that Ikea’s designers developed a plant pot that doubles as a carrying case that protects the plant during moves. “We would have never done that product if we hadn’t met her,” says Sjöblom.

Lukas Albrektsson, another intern at the time, designed a set of space-conscious stools that can stack on top of each other when not in use. Cleverly, they also include puzzle-like slots on their legs that allow one to stand on top of the other, forming a two-tier pedestal that could hold a houseplant or a pile of magazines.

Both interns pushed early on for the collection to have mostly natural hues—nothing too colorful that might clash with the surroundings. Pine is the dominant material, with only a few pops of color here and there. Even the hacked Ikea shopping bag-turned-rolling storage container ditched the company’s signature bright blue for a more muted army green.

The collection, which will hit Ikea stores in August, is basically a renter’s special, offering a mix of basic apartment furniture for a considered space, as well as low-budget necessities for a generation that knows what it’s like to have to pick up and move. The young people Ikea’s designers met with—as well as their own interns—helped turn that concept into reality. “Many products were born just by observing life,” Sjöblom says.

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Political campaigns have something new to worry about these days: unflattering or incomplete information produced by A.I. programs when voters ask questions about candidates.

The proliferation of nuclear power in space got a little more real Tuesday with the launch of a small satellite developed by a Florida-based company specializing in nuclear micro-power technology.

It's a long way from launching a bona fide nuclear reactor, a breakthrough that could help power a permanent Moon base and efficiently drive rockets throughout the Solar System. But you have to start somewhere.

The satellite from Miami-based City Labs is named BOHR, short for Betavoltaic Orbital High-Reliability, and it launched on a SpaceX rideshare mission Tuesday alongside 80 other payloads. SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket released the BOHR satellite into an orbit between 350 and 400 miles (nearly 600 km) in altitude.

Starting small

City Labs bills the BOHR mission as "the world's first commercial nuclear-powered satellite and first nuclear CubeSat." CubeSats are modest in scale, and images released by City Labs suggest BOHR is built on a "1U" CubeSat platform, a cubical design measuring about the same size as a softball. BOHR's power source is a nuclear betavoltaic battery that generates electricity from the decay of tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen.

"This is a historic step for commercial nuclear power in space," said Peter Cabauy, CEO of City Labs, in a statement. "BOHR demonstrates that safe, compact, and regulatory-approved nuclear power systems are ready for routine commercial deployment. This capability enables persistent, always-on payload operations that are not constrained by sunlight or battery life."

City Labs will use its experimental NanoTritium power generator in demonstration mode to supply electricity to a payload onboard the BOHR CubeSat. The spacecraft itself uses conventional solar power for regular operations, the company said. Betavoltaic batteries are best suited for low-power applications that require a reliable, long-duration source of electricity. These use cases include remote terrestrial sensors—such as in undersea or polar locations—and instrumentation for secure communications. City Labs is also studying the use of its NanoTritium technology to power implantable medical devices.

The space industry is the other near-term market for City Labs. NASA has worked with City Labs to look at using nuclear tritium power sources to support a network of small sensors that could be deployed into permanently shadowed craters on the Moon to scout for resources like water ice. The US Air Force and Space Force have given City Labs several research contracts, funding the development of an experimental tritium AA battery for cryptographic devices and a self-powered wireless autonomous imaging sensor. City Labs says its betavoltaic systems could also power heaters for microelectronics in harsh environments.

It's important to remember that the company's betavoltaic power systems are small—in the nanowatt to microwatt range—far short of the electricity required to power a smartphone, much less a large spacecraft or a Moon base. Still, the BOHR mission is a step in the right direction for proponents of nuclear power in space. Until now, nuclear-powered spacecraft have been solely owned by government agencies like NASA and the US military.

Commercial nuclear-powered space missions face regulatory hurdles, and BOHR was the first commercial nuclear mission to pass through the Federal Aviation Administration's new nuclear launch approval process. The FAA authorized City Labs to launch the BOHR mission last September.

It helped that the BOHR satellite carries just a tiny amount of radioactive material, and the tritium isotope decays more quickly than plutonium or uranium. It's also less toxic than other well-known nuclear fuels. "Tritium emits a weak form of radiation, a low-energy beta particle similar to an electron. The tritium radiation does not travel very far in air and cannot penetrate the skin," the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says on its website.

Future missions will have to launch with far more nuclear material than City Labs' BOHR mission, but this week's launch served as a first step.

"The BOHR mission serves as a pathfinder for future nuclear-powered spacecraft supporting both civil and national security missions," City Labs said in a statement.

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