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A clever ad campaign by an Ikea franchisee highlights how their products for kids can’t quite replace the support and comfort offered by their caregivers. (via @gray)
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kottke.org posts about Ikea
A Guitar Made From Ikea Furniture
Tchiks is a luthier from Belgium who, after his daughter outgrew her crib, turned it and a bunch of other Ikea products into a guitar.
The guitar started out as a joke. I remember going upstairs and telling my wife “I’m gonna make a guitar out of Zoé’s old bed”. She rolled her eyes to the ceiling and asked me “why”. Then I immediately thought “This is the way”.
It sounds good! Like any good craftspeople, luthiers can get a little fussy about their materials and the specs list for the Ikea guitar at the end of the video pokes some gentle fun at that:
Body: baby crib, chair, shelf
Neck: baby crib
Fretboard: photo ledge
Knob: chopping board
(via linkfest)
Lake Toiletbrush and the Curse of Ikea’s Product Names
Ikea names their products after locations all over Scandinavia and a bunch of those places in Sweden are fighting back against the practice with a clever “discover the originals” ad campaign.
From Strange Maps:
Bolmen. Now there’s a word you don’t use every day. Where have you encountered it before? In IKEA, where it’s the name of a cheap toilet brush — for a dollar, it’s yours. What you probably don’t know is that the brush was named after a pristine lake in southern Sweden. And now that you do know, that lake doesn’t sound so pristine anymore.
Call it the Curse of IKEA. A curse repeated hundreds of times across the map of Sweden. Beautiful places with exotic names, their appeal diminished by association with mundane items from the world’s most popular furniture catalog. Where does that leave the tourist industry around Lake Toiletbrush? Down in the dumps, is where.
Bodviken is “more than an IKEA countertop sink”; it’s a UNESCO World Heritage site. Voxnan is “more than an IKEA shower shelf”; it’s home to a marvelous river for fishing, paddling, and hiking. Björksta is “more than an IKEA picture with frame”; it’s an historic Viking site. You can check out more of the originals here.
A Kitchen Scraps Cookbook from Ikea
Ikea has published a cookbook for cooking with food waste called The ScrapsBook and it’s available to download for free.
IKEA has created The ScrapsBook, in collaboration with chefs from across North America. This cookbook is dedicated to cooking with the little things we usually throw away. Or, as we like to call it, “scrapcooking.”
Scrapcooking is about finding the beautiful possibilities in that banana peel, radish top, or even the chicken bones you’re about to toss, and make the most of everything available to you. It’s little things like these that can add up to make a big difference.
It includes recipes for dishes like banana peel bacon & wild rice pancakes, corn cob soup, and bruised apple butter cake. Here’s a trailer:
The cookbook also includes tips for reducing food waste throughout the text, including regrowing scallions, bok choy, and celery from the roots on your windowsill. (via huit denim)
Browse Through 72 Years of Ikea Catalogs
Ikea has uploaded scans of all 72 years of their annual catalogs, from 1950 to 2021, to their online museum. (The company’s optimism that there will be a 2021 is heartening.) An entertaining time machine of Scandinavian design trends.
The Official Recipe for Ikea Meatballs
On Twitter the other day, Ikea UK shared the official recipe for their iconic meatballs and cream sauce,— in the form of Ikea instructions naturally. As a midwesterner of partial Swedish heritage, this sort of thing is right up my alley.
It’s kind of amazing that society has collectively decided to give up all its secrets and control in the face of the pandemic — museums putting their collections online, filmmakers streaming their movies for free, people indiscriminately sending each other nudes, bands putting live performances on YouTube for free, and now this Ikea meatballs thing. The world has turned upside down. (via why is this interesting?)
Ikea Instructions for COVID-19 Quarantine
Instructions for staying at home during the pandemic, courtesy of Ikea Israel. (thx, caroline)
Ikea Recreates Famous TV Living Rooms Using Only Their Furniture
For an ad campaign running in the United Arab Emirates, Ikea recreated the famous TV living rooms from three shows using only Ikea furniture and housewares. See if you can guess which shows these are from…
(via @mkobach)
Ikea Hacks for People with Disabilities
Ikea furniture is so ubiquitous that all sorts of hacks and modifications have been designed by fans to coax new uses out of familiar shelves and tables. Now Ikea itself has gotten into the hacks game by partnering with a pair of Israeli non-profits to develop modifications to their products to help make them more accessible and useful for people with disabilities.
The 3D model for each of the hacks is available for free download and can then be constructed with a 3D printer. Cane By Me is a ledge for a cane or walking stick that attaches to the Malm bed frame:
Glass Bumper is a wheelchair bumper that protects the glass doors on Billy bookshelves:
Couch Lift fits around the legs of the Karlstad sofa, raising it further off the ground for easier sitting & standing:
(via fast company)
Robot successfully assembles an Ikea chair
Fittingly using only off-the-shelf components, a team of researchers in Singapore built a robot capable of assembling a Stefan chair from Ikea (minus actually bolting it together). The assembly time was around 20 minutes, about 5-10 minutes slower than a typical human would take.
It took a few attempts to get it right. Early on, the robots dropped wooden pins, let go of parts too soon, and performed moves that did more to dismantle the chair than assemble it. Some moves required a part to be held by both robots at the same time, and since industrial robots are far stronger than Ikea furniture, a number of mistakes ended badly. “We bought four chair kits and broke a few of them,” said Pham.
Once the robot can fully assemble Ikea furniture in near-human timeframes, I propose we stop all robotics and AI research. When humanity no longer has to struggle with Ikea assembly, we can live like Scandinavian kings and not have to worry about AI murderbots killing us all (before they get bored, of course).
Ikea-style instructions for programming algorithms
Sándor P. Fekete, Sebastian Morr, and Sebastian Stiller came up with these Ikea-style instructions for algorithms and data structures used in computer science. In addition to the three pictured above, there are also instructions for several other searches, trees, sorts, and scans.
Dictionary of Ikea product name meanings
The Ikea Dictionary is a listing of the meanings of the names of more than 1300 Ikea products.
Part of what makes IKEA unique is their product names. Each name means something, often in a funny or ambigious way. When IKEA went international, they decided to use the same Swedish names everywhere. This makes sense from an organizational sanity standpoint, but it deprives most of the world of this particular joy.
Some examples:
JERRIK - Ancient Scandinavian boy name
TROLSK - magic/enchanted, troll-like
MÖRRUM - city in south east Sweden
SNITTA - (to) cut (flowers)
SOLVAR - Norwegian boy name
VÄGGIS - made up -IS word ‘Vägg’ means ‘wall’, so ‘väggis’ could mean ‘wall thingie’
Oddly Ikea (aka Ikea ASMR)
Videos designed to invoke ASMR (“autonomous sensory meridian response”) in some viewers have grown in popularity in recent years. The videos feature soothing sounds and visuals (gentle whispering, soft scratching, watching a task being diligently performed) that are meant to provoke a response of brain tingling or a state of bliss in some people. In an attempt to ride the wave, Ikea has made a 25-minute advertisement for college dorm furniture that uses common ASMR techniques. I dunno, does cerebral euphoria make people want to buy closet organizers?
Ikea’s “Cook This Page” posters
For a promotion in a Canadian store, Ikea developed a series of posters that help you cook dinner. You lay the poster down, place the food directly on it according to the printed directions, and then you fold up the ends to cook it — the posters double as cooking parchment. (via fast company)
Ikea products are now available on Amazon
Ikea products have long been available on Amazon from 3rd-party resellers, but now Ikea is officially selling hundreds of their products on Amazon. Among the items that caught my eye are the iconic blue Frakta bags, the best kids’ drinking glasses ever made (we have dozens of these…love them), a kids’ foot stool, the Swedish meatball sauce packs, and those ubiquitous Glimma tea lights. Also, lots of rugs, picture frames, candles, bedding materials, and many of the other things that are good to stock up on. (via fast company)
Update: I am an idiot. All this Ikea stuff on Amazon is from resellers…the same stuff that’s been available for years on the site. (Same deal with all the Muji items on Amazon.) I mean, they are still genuine Ikea products and some of it isn’t even available from Ikea’s online store. Anyway, not such a huge deal. I was wondering why Ikea would be adopting such a if-you-can’t-beat-‘em-join-‘em attitude towards Amazon; turns out they’re still just trying to beat ‘em.
Update: Just the other day, Reuters reported that Ikea will test selling items through third-party websites.
“I leave unsaid on which (platforms), but we will test and pilot, to see ‘what does this mean, what does digital shopping look like in future and what do digital shopping centers mean?’,” he said.
IKEA, known for its warehouse-like stores, has recently restructured to give its retail arm more freedom. The Swedish firm has never sold its goods through another company and is also trying new smaller store formats and stepping up integration of stores and online to adapt to new ways of shopping.
(via @checkdisout)
18th century Instagram
A cute Ikea ad imagines what Instagram might have been like in the 18th century…it involves a painter and a lot of driving around in a carriage soliciting likes.
The Simpsons couch gag in the style of an Ikea instruction manual
The couch gag on last night Simpsons episode was illustrated in the style of an Ikea instruction manual. See also the Ikea instructions for making Dick in the Box.
Cool Ikea hack: make a bicycle out of a FROSTA stool
With just a few modifications, Samuel Bernier and Andreas Bhends made a working bicycle out of a pair of Ikea FROSTA stools.
(via @kellianderson)
“Life in Ikea is impossible”
The trailer for Alfonso Cuarón’s “Ikea”, a film about a man and a woman lost in the vast nothingness of Ikea.
(via ★interesting)
You can buy stuff from Ikea on Amazon!
One of the frustrations people have with Ikea is that you can’t order online from them (at least in the US). You have to go to the store or hire someone to go to the store for you. Not sure when they started doing this, but you can now buy a bunch of Ikea products from Amazon…some items even have free shipping if you’re a Prime user.
Unfortunately, they don’t sell the meatballs but they do carry the Swedish meatball sauce and lingonberry jam. (via @alexandrak)
Update: Hmm, it seems you can shop online at Ikea…but the shipping and handling costs are insane ($129 to ship a $299 chair). Also of note if you hadn’t already guessed…the products on Amazon are often more expensive than they are at Ikea. Mark up!
Update: Further clarification in case it’s unclear…Ikea is not selling this stuff on Amazon, it’s all third-party resellers. So caveat emptor and all that (and that goes triple for eBay). Ikea wants you in the store, not shopping online.
As the book business changes, so do the bookshelves
Ikea is modifying their popular Billy bookcase to hold more than just books.
TO SEE how profoundly the book business is changing, watch the shelves. Next month IKEA will introduce a new, deeper version of its ubiquitous “BILLY” bookcase. The flat-pack furniture giant is already promoting glass doors for its bookshelves. The firm reckons customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome-anything, that is, except books that are actually read.
In the first five months of this year sales of consumer e-books in America overtook those from adult hardback books. Just a year earlier hardbacks had been worth more than three times as much as e-books, according to the Association of American Publishers. Amazon now sells more copies of e-books than paper books. The drift to digits will speed up as bookshops close. Borders, once a retail behemoth, is liquidating all of its American stores.
As the bookshelf industry scrambles to retool, a Kindle cozy industry rises. (via @austinkleon)
Ikea cookbook
Ikea is coming out with a cookbook — the name translates as “Homemade is Best” — and the photography looks great.
Design actually within reach
Greg Allen finally finished his version of Enzo Mari’s 1974 Autoprogettazione dining table made from wood from Ikea’s Ivar shelving system. An example of the Mari’s original table went at auction a few years ago for $14,000; Allen paid $120 for his Ikea raw materials.
1965 Ikea catalog
From the looks of the 1965 Ikea catalog, the company could make a killing selling that same furniture today. Maybe they should do that rather than switching to Verdana. (thx, paolo)
Update: From a museum display, a photograph of a bunch of old Ikea catalog covers.
Ikea as tourist attraction
For many Chinese, the Ikea in Beijing is not just a store, it’s a lifestyle amusement park with free admission.
Bai mapped out a five-hour outing. First, they had hot dogs and soft ice cream cones at noon. Then they enjoyed a long rest lounging on the beds. Bai kicked off her sandals and sprawled out on a Tromso bunk bed. The 36-year-old homemaker made herself comfortable and even answered passing shoppers’ questions about the quality of the mattress. “It’s soft and a great buy at this price,” she told a young woman, pointing to a dangling price tag. After that, Bai and her family took group pictures. By 5 p.m., it was time for another meal, so they headed to the cafeteria and ate braised mushrooms with rice.
Assembling Ikea groceries into meals
Serious Eats contributor Michele Humes buys some groceries at Ikea and prepares some unexpected dishes from them, including canapés made from Swedish flatbread, crab paste, and lumpfish caviar. Don’t know why, but it never occurred to me to make spaghetti and meatballs using Ikea meatballs. (thx, david)
Free Red Hook Ikea taxi
When the new Ikea is finished, it’ll be easier than ever to get to Red Hook from Manhattan. The Serious Eats crew noticed that the free ferry deposits interested eaters about four blocks from the renowned Red Hook soccer taco vendors.
Jason Salavon’s Field Guide to Style &
Jason Salavon’s Field Guide to Style & Color, a reproduction of the 2007 Ikea catalog with everything but the structure and color excluded. You may remember Mr. Salavon from his composite photographs and videos of blowjobs, late night talk show hosts, and Playboy centerfolds.
Big Box Watch is a map that
Big Box Watch is a map that displays future big box store openings in the US. The site currently tracks Best Buy, Home Depot, Ikea, JCPenney, Kohl’s, Lowe’s, Target, and Wal-Mart.
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