What if Ikea Designed Computers?
Ikea offers a full range of computer-friendly desks and workstations—but what if the Swedish furniture giant designed desktop hardware as well? That’s the question being asked by Niero Gonzalez on the WePC.com discussion boards, and he’s compiled a handful of amusing examples of the imaginary results. He’s joking, of course—or is he? Gonzalez writes that the idea is actually “quite practical” and that it would be relatively easy for a company to make “cheap, standardized housings for computer parts and let people click them together.” Maybe so—and certainly most computer hardware could use a dose of clean, simple design (Apple’s Braun fetish being the one obvious exception). But as someone who once spent an entire Saturday in “indescribable purgatory” assembling an Ikea bed frame, I ardently hope this day never comes.
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Branding is fundamentally the wrong approach to making computer assembly easier. In the past decade or so, putting your own computer together has become vastly more user freindly because manufacturers have compromised and agreed to more integrable standards. With the IKEA approach, ikea cashes in on distinctiveness, which cuts down their ability to integrate with what other manufacturers are doing. I’d rather have an ugly self-built machine than a Mac because I dont want to be locked in to the confines of what a single company offers. Thats the whole point of self-assembly.
Design people never get this though. Apple came out with all this marketing theory about how people dont like machines, and how they want all their mechanical objects and processes to have big round corners on them, and then the whole design industry bought into this and never thought outside that box. The truth is that some people do like machines. Calculating is a fundamental human behavior. We are naturally predisposed to be intruigued by technical processes. The IKEA computer would be whooly dissatisfying in that regard.
Comment by Reed Walton — June 26, 2009, @ 12:45 pm
* didn’t mean to leave half of that in italics, sorry.
Comment by Reed Walton — June 26, 2009, @ 12:46 pm
Well put Reed. I would add that Apple is not the ID nirvana they are held up to be. They are just clever stylists. A quarter century ago they embodied design innovation with real attention to UI and even well thought out manufacturing processes. Now they make cumbersome impractical toys for ‘fashionistas’. Sadly, they great minds they have that can build excellent software and hardware are wasted on the final products that are simply misguided.
For instance, could you imagine what this talent could do if they got to design a phone? Instead they are sidetracked building feature creatures that can play every useless game in town except make a decent call easily and intuitively. That’s not design, but it is very clever business and I’ll give that to them. However, we are already inundated with enough consumer junk. We hardly need more toys, Dieter Rams influenced or not.
Comment by Rein — June 27, 2009, @ 12:22 am