The Brief:
IKEA set the challenge: a young family in a twenty-square-metre Berlin apartment, and how to live well in it. Each team took one part of that life, sleep, play, storage. Ours was work.
We surveyed nine parents aged 29 to 40 about managing work alongside a small child.
The tools they named were all about supervision at a distance, monitors, cameras, white-noise machines, slings. What they actually wanted was simpler.
Parents want the child close by while they work. In the same space, within reach.
Wanting the child nearby has a physical consequence that furniture ignores.
A two-year-old plays on the floor, so the parent goes down too, laptop on a coffee table, a cushion, their knees. We mapped these positions and marked where the strain lands: neck, shoulders, lower back, wrists. None is a posture you could hold for a working day.
Hendrik is a bent-plywood workstation in two heights that share one form.
The low module sits at floor level, so a parent can work beside a playing child instead of hunching over a coffee table. The taller module works with a chair. Stacked, they make a standing desk with a shelf beneath.
