How Ikea Turned a Controller Thumbstick Into the Star of Its Xbox Gaming Range - WIRED

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IKEA HAS TAKEN another swing at a gaming gear collection, but this time it brought in a ringer: Xbox. The new nine-piece range, revealed at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, came about not through whiteboard marketing brainstorms, but a meeting between the Xbox and Ikea design teams at Milan Design Week in 2024.

Hearing the Xbox team—including Carl Ledbetter, head of Xbox devices design—was in Milan at the same time, Ikea product design developer Philip Dilé wanted to show off the company's latest creations, the Brännboll gaming collection, that pleasingly stepped away from sharp edges, RGB lighting, and a black color palette.

“That was a bit of an icebreaker," Dilé tells WIRED. "We were exploring gaming, so we wanted to team up with experts who really understand how people play. We know a lot about life at home, but we wanted to specifically understand how you design for gamers.”

Two years on, Ikea's new Yxstaby range is the fruit of that Milan meeting. The collection takes the ethos of 2024's Brännboll, where gaming gear sits well within home decor and doesn't look like it belongs in a bachelor's basement. But it also moves it forward by taking liberal inspiration from Xbox design cues.

Aimed at making it easier to bring gaming into living rooms and tuck everything away afterwards, the range includes a side table on wheels that can store controllers while charging them at the same time behind sliding doors; a toolbox that keeps cables and hardware under a lid that doubles as a laptop stand; a gaming lounge chair with a webbed pocket underneath to stow controllers out of sight; and even a rollable TV stand for a set of up to 55 inches, one that has a split level shelf for consoles.

Overtly Xbox-inspired pieces include a green gaming D-pad cushion and a surprisingly elegant D-pad controller platter, originally designed as a stool. Johan Ejdemo, Ikea's head of design, removed the base and played with the seat, eventually deciding it would make a fine plate or tray.

The original idea for the D-pad stool, which was converted into a platter.

What became of the D-pad stool—an elegant platter for your controllers or remotes.

The star of the Yxstaby gaming collection is unquestionably the thumbstick stool, though. Ikea designer David Wahl, who queued all night 25 years ago to get his hands on the very first Xbox, persuaded the Xbox designers to hand over the controller's original 3D design files so he could manipulate them to iterate on different ideas.

“I was exploring keyboard chairs, but then it hit me: What is it that you're actually using when you're playing? The input devices,” Wahl says. “You have buttons and the control stick—and the control stick is moving. And, hey, it looks like a stool. What if you could enlarge it and actually sit on it?”

It turns out Ikea had been making a product for years that became the foundation of the thumbstick stool—an extending office stool with a rounded base called the Nilserik. “That's an Ikea classic, an old product, and I got inspired by the function of the Nilserik. What if we make something similar, but for gamers, and also update the design? That was the starting point.”

The thumbstick stool was designed to mimic the thumbstick on the Xbox controller.

Even at an early prototype stage, the thumbstick stool proved to be a hit. Wahl says at one workshop with the Xbox team, the console designers were instantly attached to the stool and wanted it in the collection.

“It was totally immediate,” Ledbetter confirms. “It was hands down, ‘We just have to do it.’ And then it became not a question of if we should do it—how do we do it in a compelling way? What's the right scale? What are the ergonomics? Can it move and swivel around?”

Indeed, it wasn't as simple as just sizing up the existing Xbox thumbstick to make the stool. It needed more than a little fettling. “The thumbstick is designed for maximum grip when you're controlling a game, but it's not really suitable to sit on. It's kind of aggressive and sharp,” Wahl says. “So the first task is to how to make this comfortable, and how to keep the same iconic shape. You have to see that this is a thumbstick, but you're sitting on it.”

That's when Ikea began prototyping the stool in various materials such as cork and wood. Wahl says the company did a lot of 3D printing, with different versions of the base's radius. One had a completely round base, which made it very unstable, though Wahl thought it was fun because it required a lot of attention when sitting on it.

Ledbetter was surprised just how nice the thumbstick stool is to perch on. “Oh my, this is very comfortable," he says. “It feels good, and it can accommodate multiple playing postures. I can't tell you how many people are like, ‘I gotta have that thumbstick stool.’ It's just a delighter.”

Wahl's team added more Xbox details afterward, such as rubber rings for grip on the base that mirror rings on the top of swappable Elite controller thumbsticks. As you assemble the stool, there's a surprise for the particularly observant.

“To gamify the collection, I like to hide elements of surprise in my products," Wahl says. "Xboxes hide ‘Hello from Seattle’ written somewhere on the console. We hid a similar message that you only see once when you assemble a stool, ‘Hej from Älmhult.’”

That's the small Swedish town where Ikea's HQ is based. Looking beyond the stool's hidden hello, Ikea has added Easter eggs throughout its new gaming collection, which will drop in stores and online this fall.

As for the possibility of future Ikea and Xbox collections, Ledbetter isn't ruling it out. In fact, the teams have leftover ideas still strong enough to make the grade for a second range. “I'm hesitant to talk about some of the ones that are still on the table—because they're still on the table,” he says. “All I can say is there's a bunch of really good ideas that we just didn't have the bandwidth to make. I don't want to give those away, because they're interesting.”

Ledbetter's excitement for working with Ikea is refreshingly genuine in the world of collaborations. Dotted among the Herman Miller and Eames furniture in his home are numerous Ikea items, including shelving and pots for his plants.

“And here's a little-known fact: When Ikea opened the first store in Renton, Washington, back in the late '90s, my wife and I were the first in line to go there," Ledbetter says. "The local news station even interviewed her because she was so excited. We are Ikea fans.”