Ikea Hacking: Ikea as Legos for adults
There’s a great article on the Ikea Hackers culture that’s sprung up in the last few years: Romancing the Flat Pack: Ikea, Repurposed. (Warning: New York Times usually requires a login.)
The article talks about how people take Ikea components and create different things out of them: guitars (wow!), other furniture, art pieces, etc. A lot of these are whimsical, like a weiner-dog bench or a surfboard table. For more examples, check out this blog. An official Ikea representative was reportedly thrilled and said this was an example of people finding the Ikea brand to be friendly and fun.
This is one more way in which Ikea is Legos for adults. (Note: lots of people have made this Legos=Ikea observation before me, so I’m not being original here.)
US people age 20-40 make up the first generation of grown-up Lego kids. Legos toys came out in the early-mid 1960s and really got going strong in the 1970s-80s. So those US kids are now grown.
Lego and Ikea sprang from similar cultural foundations. Legos started with a wooden toy maker in Denmark. Ikea started in Sweden and is also based in the Netherlands. So clearly there’s something in the water up there in the eastern North Sea that makes people think about modular Modern-style products.
Ikea flatpacks are Lego play sets. Lego sells play sets that provide all the Lego pieces and instructions to build a given Lego environment: dinosaurs, castles, pirates, etc. But of course kids always end up recombining their Lego pieces to build other stuff, and use other toys in the process (GI Joe in a Lego tank, etc.). Just like the Ikea hackers are doing.
Ikea hacking is about play, creativity and identity. It’s about taking pieces and re-envisioning / reusing them. As Michael Zbyszynski from UC Berkeley says in the article, “It’s all about not accepting what’s presented for sale as it is….about not just doing a ‘paint by numbers’ of your life.”
Both Lego and Ikea companies encourage hacking by their product design and their corporate approach to post-purchase consumer creativity. Lego play packs come in product families with names like Mindstorm and Bionicle, just as Ikea releases product families where the furniture comes in a similar style. This is an invitation to mix-and-match.
I predict Ikea will eventually actively promote Ikea hacking through some kind of consumer post-purchase design award or design competition. Lego has been doing this for years; it’s great brand-building, esp in this Experience Economy where people want to do stuff, not just buy stuff.
It’s great for branding that the word Ikea is so similar to the English word Idea. So Ikea marketing people: stroke of genius.