“It started with an invitation from the LEGO Group “Do you want to play?” says Fredrika Inger, Business Area Manager for Children’s IKEA, about their collaboration with Lego Group, just announced.
“Of course we said yes to this and together we now want to enable more play by triggering play in the functionality of the everyday life. At IKEA we first and foremost want to resolve this built in or maybe just perceived conflict that play is messy in a creative, humanistic and playful way. Because we believe more play makes the home and the world a better place”.
In the IKEA Play Report, IKEA asked children what they want and 47% of them said that they want more playtime with their parents. At the same time 90% of the asked parents believe play is essential to wellbeing and happiness, building on to the belief that play is important.
Besides, in an upcoming study on play made by the LEGO Group, 95% of parents responded that play is fundamental to their child’s development and that playing with LEGO bricks helps their children to be creative.
Then why parents and kids don’t play more? In the everyday life there are different barriers for play. Some of the barriers are more evident for grown-ups, who think that playing can be messy. Other barriers are more evident to children: grown-ups trying to create order in the play environment, where children in fact enjoy and often immerse themselves in the midst of it all.
IKEA – LEGO collaboration aims to increase the opportunity for playing more, firstly trying to make the whole home a better functioning and more fun place.
“In the LEGO Group our mission has always been to inspire and develop children through play” says Lena Dixen, Senior Vice President, Product Development at the LEGO Group. “There’s an exciting and fun challenge in finding a solution that can encourage more creative LEGO play while at the same time pleasing parent’s interest in household look and feel to enable children and their parents to play together. We know that being creative and trying out new things can be messy. In our collaboration with IKEA we therefore wish to deal with the challenge that some parents might have with the – wonderful – mess that play creates”,
We should wait at least a couple of years to see what IKEA stores will propose to the customer, trying to get more of the many people to say “yes” to play.