vi-R-us

I wrote this IKEA HACKING article for this month’s ICON……..

We’re all good little consumers. Unless we’re trained in the art of deconstruction, we see things as whole. When we eat in restaurants we taste food as something complete, the “more” in the “more than the sum of the parts.” This innate respect for things is a necessary part of the capitalist construct, the thing that makes us feel okay about paying a lot for things with no little or no real value (think of bottled water for example). It is why today’s brands and products are so slickly presented, it’s a way of saying “You couldn’t do it, so you need us.”

The notion of remix culture has been knocking around the progressive end of trendwatcher’s briefings for some time, drawing from insights into youth culture who are reworking fashion, music, film and art to suit their new world view that nothing begins and ends but operates on a continuum in a perpetual state of ‘mash.’ The view that nothing starts and ends echoes abstract, brain boggling quantum physics but on further inspection reveals some quite simple and compelling truths. Only the naïve believe in truly original ideas. Like energy, ideas are not created or destroyed but change from one form to another. The resonances and reverberations of ideas, designs and experiences ripple across space and time, influencing everything we do, whether we like it or not. Music was like this before we were able to record, control and ultimately own it and was thus a never ending, iterative mash-up that strangely just came round full circle.

And as these ripples flow from mediums and materials that are by their nature highly mixable, we see this prevailing perspective touch a more sacred symbol of our sophisticated, civilised culture: IKEA.

How many times have you commented on how it’s cheaper buying material already made into furniture by IKEA than the raw material itself? Economies of scale at this magnitude have made the impossible a reality, buying highly evolved furniture that is weight for weight cheaper than porridge. Follow these insights to their logical conclusion and you quickly get to considering items more building blocks and raw materials than finished units. If they are cheaper than raw materials then why do they not replace them? But there’s a huge barrier that has up until recently prevented this from spurning a fully blown trend; our monumental respect for the finished thing.

Yet somehow the undercurrents are starting to push upwards through the work of a dedicated few working to unite cells of IKEA evolutionaries. One web site bringing focus to activity is IKEA HACKER. It champions the work and ideas of those dare to think outside the flat-pack box. The blog features new suggestions and projects that feed a database that is ever evolving and which in time may cover every likely requirement a home maker might have for an IKEA remix. Just as the Topshop trick became an acceptable or even obligatory mixing of the very cheap and accessible with the chic and exclusive, perhaps we’ll see this parallel trend in interiors where custom Klippans, Billys and Karlstads will co-exist happily alongside Barcelonas, Pantons and Jacobsens.

IKEA HACKER reports on Adam from Boston’s hack of a $19 Benjamin stool to make an attractive and practical alternative to one costing $150. In Lee’s basement studio hack we see how simple adaptations to out of the box products create an oddly premium feel.

Jules who runs the site provides the commentary, helping us identify models and offers encouragement and feedback to readers and hackers. Every hack and the database grows, every project the movement gaining critical momentum.

Maxim Velcovsky’s Wing Chair

On more familiar turf we’ve already seen designers turning their hands to hacking. Maxim Velcovsky’s Ikeana project followed very similar lines, engaging the Czech cultural movement known as Ikeaism. Italian Gruppo A12 also installed an ambitious hack in Stockholm’s Tensta Konsthall, built almost entirely out of LACK tables.

Gruppo A12’s Lack Project

IKEA’s inclusively has brought modern design into the homes of the masses but ubiquity quickly turns to generic, rendering any personal expression void. The hacker reverses this, transforming the general into the specific with the alchemy of inventiveness and imagination. Inadvertently IKEA has taken inclusiveness to the next level, offering the buyer affordability and a co-creditation for the role of ‘Designer.”

This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 8:48 am and is filed under THOUGHT CORNER. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.