This Collab Could Make Ikea Furniture Building a LOT Easier
Some of us (masochists, myself included) love the wholeIkea shopping experience. Cinnamon buns and (now, meatless!) Swedish meatballs fueling your quest to redecorate, little pencils scribbling numbers you’ll never be able to decipher, spending way more than you originally planned (all those Sinnligs really add up). Likely, more of us are just in it for the final product — enviable, affordable furniture you can dress up or down, hack to make even better and move with you from dorm to first home. But there’s another step in there that I’m sure we just all hate: building what you bought. Well, imagine a world where you could put together your Ikea furniture, triumphantly proclaim “nailed it!” and not have used one darn nail in the process. The folks over at Core 77 are imagining it and hoping a small design firm with a great, big idea can make it happen.
We second that notion.
Minale-Maeda is the Netherlands-based design studio that created Keystones, a line of furniture self-joined with 3D printed connectors. Although they don’t have a plan to work with Ikea (or any other budget, build-it-yourself furniture purveyor for that matter) we would REALLY like it if they did.
Their vision for your furniture-assembling future looks a whole lot easier than an encyclopedia of instructions and a daunting sack of screws and nuts. Instead, you would buy pieces of wood in different sizes along with prefabricated connectors to fit them together.
Although it would be rad to see these parts sold alongside your Expedits, Larks and Karlstads, Minale-Maeda imagines makers firing up their MakerBots and Micros at home to print out what they need. All Ikea would have to do is supply the furniture pieces. Unless they wanted to get in on the 3D printing action. Can’t hate that.
The connectors would make it super simple to move or change your furniture as your wandering design eye wavers. Heck, Ikea could even market to that, offering up pieces that you could simply switch in to give your room an instant makeover. If you were feeling really crafty, there could be a whole other element of the design process here — cutting your own wood or furniture material of choice, printing in your color palette and DIYing your little heart out.
We’re dubbing this the ultimate Ikea Hack of our destiny. We just have one question… what WILL we do with all of those Allen wrenches?!
What’s the best Ikea hack you’ve ever tried? Could you see yourself printing pieces of your home decor from the comfort of home? Share below!
(h/t: Core77)