Ikea's bizarre brain wave test for wannabe rug buyers

Only truly infatuated Belgians will be allowed to nab one of Ikea’s latest range of limited edition rugs.

In a bid to curb the on-selling trend, the Swedish decor brand is testing the brainwaves of people wanting to buy a rug from the Ikea Art Event 2019 collection in Brussels and Antwerp.

According to inc.com, when the range of eight artist-designed rugs was launched in Belgium, shoppers were asked to summit to a brain scan before being allowed to buy anything.

Called the (He)art Scanner, it’s an electronic headband that takes a reading of shoppers’ brainwaves to determine how emotionally effected they are by the rugs. A less than jazzy brain reading will mean no purchase for you. Spark the machine up like Guy Fawkes Night and you’re good to go.

Ikea claims it means fewer buyers will pick up the rugs at store price, only to flip them on trading and auction sites for massively inflated prices.

The scanner comes a little late to stop buyers at other sites across Europe flipping the rugs at exorbitant prices. A rug by Virgil Abloh was already for sale on eBay for 10 times the original sale price, US$5,000 (NZ$7,800) for a rug that originally cost US$500.

The Ikea scanner was designed by Ogilvy Social Lab Brussels, with the brief to create a way for the company to ensure “you can only buy it, if you feel it”.

According to Adweek, with the rugs displayed in a gallery setting, prospective buyers would put on the headset and look at the rugs. The scanner and algorithm would decide if the buyer was moved by the rugs, and a corresponding number would appear on the wall.

This is the fifth year Ikea have run the Art Event collaboration project, which teams the decor giant’s designers with some of the top up-and-coming hip artists and designers, “making art accessible to everyone”.

The 2019 collab included France’s street art muralist Supakitch, US absurdist sculptors Chiaozza, outsider artist Noah Lyon from the US, fashion designer Craig Green from the UK, Korean abstract artist Seulgi Lee, US fashion designer and artistic director of Louis Vuitton‘s menswear ready wear line Virgil Abloh, childlike Japanese artist Misaki Kawai, and legendary Polish graphic artist and illustrator Filip Pagowski.

When the rug project was announced on Ikea’s website in 2018, creative leader for the collection Henrik Most said he hoped the rugs would become “exclamation marks in the home”.

“Whether you walk all over them, hang them on a wall or make them your own any other way… Rugs have a long tradition of being perceived as art rather than something we primarily choose for their function. This collection gave us the opportunity to explore the traditions and place them in a modern context.”

• This article originally appeared on stuff.co.nz