Why You Love That Ikea Table, Even If It's Crooked (2013)
npr.org
npr.org
1) Have a set of standard template furniture items
2) Allow user to view the item through a WebGL viewer (or however its done these days).
3) Allow the user to adjust certain aspects of that piece of furniture within the viewer. IE desk surface height, depth, space between legs etc.
4) Use parametric algorithms to adjust the componentry accordingly within existing load bearing parameters. For example, "desktop needs attachment screws every 200mm". This kind of formula is already commonplace in many CAD packages [1].
5) Have the backend software export the parts as CNC cut files and create a bill of materials.
6) Package the cut parts and additional components (screws etc) and ship direct to client.
7)(optional depending on level of unscrupulousness) Have the parametric algorithms incorporate a fatigue based breaking point so they can justify throwing the crumbling desk away in five years and you can sell them more furniture "they" designed that is more in line with current trends.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GClGn1Y7bNA#t=3m58s
EDIT: formatting
[1] http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/categories/departments/bed... [2] http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/categories/departments/liv...
I bought a bed from Ikea, but it came incomplete. And it never was exactly as I wanted it. So I threw away most of the parts and made my own bed around few of the side boards. It didn't take one evening but a week of evenings.
Empowered by that experience I made legs for my desk. Shelf from scratch. Painted one old shelf that would have otherwise gone to garbage. Assembled sliding boxes to go under that bed. Sanded my girlfriends old table. Etc.
We have like one very cheap piece of furniture from IKEA and made lot's ourselves. So it's very bad business model to sell stuff that's not quite right, but has obviously usable parts. If you allow people to design their own shit, you run another risk. Especially with current prices of power tools.
The original product just required water but failed in the market, because American housewives believed that just adding water and sticking something in the oven was not 'cooking'. It was a shortcut that made them look bad. So Betty Crocker came up with the idea of providing a dry mix that required the cook to add an egg to the dry mix. That was the secret, by adding one ingredient people could save face and believe that they were 'cooking'.
IKEA is leveraging the same principle -- inserting and tightening a few screws and bolts here and there and you feel like you've 'built' something.
Very powerful stuff....
I tried other self assembled furniture before - the quality was just not there. I did not love them, and threw them away as soon as they became too obviously crooked.
Using the Ikea brand in the title is incorrect if the specific effect described should extend to Walmart furniture, but doesn't.
Other people have the same stuff and after 1 move it's loose/wobbly without glue.
The trick is that with IKEA ware, even joints that in theory shouldn't need glue benefit from it. In some pieces, there is some fastener holding parts together, often that silly cam screw which locks onto the head of a pin. Then there are secondary dowel pins that, in theory, reduce a degree of freedom and prevent parts from rotating.
Problem is, those cam lock things are poorly designed. So in fact the joint benefits from glue.
That is not a trick; that's how you complete dowel pin joints in woodworking. If the only thing holding a joint together is dowels, you must glue.
Here is the thing. In some IKEA units, the dowel pins only prevent the rotation of a part, which is held by a metal fastener (e.g. those shit cam screw and lock things). Glue isn't going to do much there, in theory!
In practice, those fasteners are poorly designed garbage, so the glue will help there.
Ikea gets a lot of things right, but if you don't like their aesthetic, you're pretty much out of luck finding something of similar quality for that price point.
"Works and scales" may have everything to do with Ikea's shady tax structure[1], not its flat-pack furniture.
[1]https://www.fastcodesign.com/3035734/infographic-of-the-day/...
TL;DR: You'd have trouble producing furniture in other, more traditional styles that could also be flat packed and assembled at home by the average consumer at a reasonable price point.
Besides, there has to be an easier way to make money than competing with companies like Ikea, which has spent decades wringing out costs from one end of the supply chain to the other.
When I make something and look at it I notice every little flaw. When I look at something from IKEA I notice its made of painted compressed particle board and held together with pegs and plastic cam screws.
Maybe people should care about the quality of what they make and how it looks.
Cheap beats quality in soo many cases.
Funny, it's almost as though not everyone is the same.
Would be interesting to see it applied to relationships.
Some of their stuff is just junk, though.