It wasn’t a Billy bookcase or Malm bed – but an entire flat-pack refugee shelter. The Swedish furniture giant’s innovation has just been crowned Beazley design of the year 2016 by London’s Design Museum. “If you compare life in the tents and life in these shelters, it’s a thousand times better,” Saffa, 34, told UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency. Photograph: Åsa Sjöström/Ikea foundation“The shelters were never designed to meet Swiss fire regulations,” says Märta Terne of Better Shelter, “or to be used indoors as the city proposed. But the Better Shelter is a real improvement – from its flexibility to it being the only shelter of its kind you can actually stand up in.

Source: The Guardian January 27, 2017 13:55 UTC