Emotional fixtures

Ikea unveiled a sculptural light design collection with designer Sabine Marcelis in February. The VARMBLIXT collection is part of Ikea’s “long-term goal… to encourage a shift in the perception of lighting as simply functional to lighting as emotional,” the company stated in a press release on their website. The collection is a playful take on traditional lighting with colorful accents, unusual sculpture and shapes, and leverages direct and indirect light designed intentionally to evoke calmness, emotion, serenity and curiosity in the home.

Mexican ceramic studio Menat is creating urns designed to comfort and address feelings of grief and loss. Photographer Marianna Jamadi collaborated with Menat to design the Kunokaiku urns for her parents, which turned into a wider collection of urns meant to be placed on display in the home and incorporated into a daily ritual as a way of coping and memorializing a lost loved one. Jamadi told Wallpaper* that she feels “it's nice to have an object that you can interact with. That you can stay tethered to” in times of grief.

At CES this year, LG unveiled the MoodUp fridge: an at-home appliance designed to reflect someone’s emotional state. The refrigerator’s LED door panels can be changed and customized with 23 individual color options, seasonal settings, emotional pre-set settings, and more. Sensors on the top and bottom panels detect and will react when a user has entered the kitchen. The built-in Bluetooth speaker can connect to other home devices to play music and will flash and adjust the lighting of the doors to match the rhythm.

Emotional wellness is becoming more than a nice-to-have practice: it’s bleeding into daily life, becoming a normal, integrated faction of a person’s routine and ritual.