99% Invisible - 128- Hacking IKEA

Episode Date: August 20, 2014

IKEA hacking is the practice of buying things from IKEA and reengineering—or “hacking”—them to become customized, more functional, and often just better designed stuff. The locus of the IKEA hacking movement is a website called IKEAhackers.net. It’s a showcase for … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. IKEA Hacking. Is what we've been doing. And this is friend of the show Sean Cole. And yes, he said IKEA Hacking. I feel good about it. It feels a little bit subversive. And a little bit bourgeois. It's like being a punk member of the mainstream. Given that our audience is, you know, our audience, you probably heard of IKEA hacking.

It's the practice of buying stuff from IKEA and then re-engineering it, hacking it, into customized, more functional and often just way better designed stuff. In Sean's case, that stuff is three, five foot high shelves. Sean has decided upon the Calix variety. Plus two very heavy wooden doors from Home Depot, all of which he is drilling and screwing and bolting together into one big beautiful queen size, Frankenstein storage bed, to cure his basement-less New York City existence. one big, beautiful, queen-sized, Frankenstein storage bed to cure his basement-less New York City existence.

We are finishing the construction of the third Calix shelf. We become expert Calix assemblers. The locus of the IKEA Hacking Movement is a website called IKEAHacker's.net. It's a showcase for those who would trick out their callxes, their arkelstorps, their flard fools. They can both gather tips from their hackers and, more importantly, boast pictures of their

own hacks and even a step-by-step guide to how they made them. IKEAHacker's.net has been in the news a lot lately, and not for happy reasons. You might have read those stories online. We're going to get into all that later. But first, I wanted to introduce you to my hacker partner in crime, Jonathan Bean. Four bolts and one wrench. He's an assistant professor at Bucknell University. Back in 2009, he co-wrote a serious academic paper about IKEA hacking with Danielle Rossner,

who now teaches design at the University of Washington. And they got interested in part because of how bendable the term IKEA hacking is. Here's Jonathan. There was so much when you scratched the surface about what IKEA hacking could be. It could be anything from, I bought this shelf at IKEA and it was an inch too long for my closet, so I cut an inch off of it. Or could be where you just take a say a salad bowl and make it into a light. And this is Daniella. Right, that's not even actually changing the object itself, it's just changing its use. And at the other

end of the spectrum, an artist named Sandra von Wussel did a very provocative work of art, which is an IKEA chair reconfigured to look like a stirrup from a kind of college's office. So, and both of these things fall under the rubric of IKEA hacking. That's a really wide rubric. And now please put your hands over your children's ears for 20 seconds. I really like the IKEA Love Toy as another example where you take it. IKEA Love Toy as another example where you take a IKEA Love Toy a Love Toy made of the

Orm song shoot trees and an IKEA product that's the milk frothing device so taking those together and making a little vibrator This is a much racier interview than I was expecting And the hacker Rade aren't just diverse in terms of their sensibility. They're diverse in the most basic way possible. You see Hacks posted from all over this country and from Australia, Russia, Israel, Dubai. Someone posted a Hacks that's a French country house library in an actual French country house. He used 60 billion beno bookcases and he has these before and after pictures

and explained all how he did it. Because everything's exactly the same at IKEA, no matter where you are, it sort of lowers the barriers to recreating something. Because this is the thing. Say I wanted to teach you, Roman, how to build a workbench. But you live in Germany and I live in the US.

If you go and buy a stud, a wood stud at a home depot in the US, it's gonna be an inch and a half by three and a half inches. If you go and buy a wood stud at Bauhaus, which is German home improvement store, it's going to be a different size. Wait, to tell me I'm not dreaming and he just said that there's a German home improvement store

called Bauhaus. Yes, but it's actually Swiss. That's so fantastic. I'm not dreaming. I'm not dreaming. I'm not dreaming. I'm not dreaming. I'm not dreaming. I'm not dreaming. I'm not dreaming. I'm not dreaming. I'm not dreaming. I'm not dreaming. I'm not dreaming.

I'm not dreaming. I'm not dreaming. I'm not dreaming. I'm not dreaming. I'm not dreaming. I'm not dreaming. I'm not dreaming. I'm not dreaming.

I'm not dreaming. I'm not dreaming. I'm not dreaming. I'm not dreaming. I'm not dreaming. I'm not dreaming. I'm not dreaming. I'm not dreaming. I'm not dreaming. That's what's allowing this global community of hackers to thrive. So if I posted a Nike hack in Boston and someone in the Netherlands saw it, they could probably reproduce it using the pieces at their local store, much like a Lego kit. Make no mistake, the actual posts themselves showing your work. That's a huge part of this whole thing.

I think that there is something to this feeling of recognition. Like, it's, you're not creative unless you recognize it's being creative. Yeah. If, if IKEA is hacked in a forest, does it make a sound? Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Hey dolls, it's theater here and I have officially done my first IKEA hack. I'm gonna show you how I'm gonna do it. IKEA hack! My first IKEA hack! So we've got an Ikea piece that will be modifying. And as you might expect, there's a lot of this kind of hacking and showing and telling on YouTube too. By now the search term shouldn't be too mysterious. Ikea hack.

And we are checking out her beautiful Ikea transformation pieces, which I like to call them. You call them hack jobs. Hack jobs. I'll show you how to customize. You wear a Kia's Halsa armchair. I'm gonna go measure how far my elbows are up in relation to this desk. Now let's put on the marble contact paper onto the top of the table. Okay and there we have our installed six inch cabinet. So now we have a really cool shoe locker. You don't know if it's for my Kia. It could be. It might not be.

For $44 worth of parts for my key, I could be, it might not be. For $44 with the parts for my key, but what I've done, I mean, if they're good enough to do some frankly pretty remarkable things with these materials, like why aren't they just going and buying raw lumber and screws and nails and hammering together something maybe more lasting and less press-bordy? Well, they're not just hacking the materials, right? They're hacking IKEA. They're hacking the brand. They're hacking what that brand actually symbolizes beyond just the stores.

Or put another way to quote Daniel and Jonathan, they're mocking the modularity of IKEA. Saying this stuff is so tinkertoy, I can mix and mash up the hell out of IKEA. Saying this stuff is so tinker toy, I can mix and mash up the hell out of it. And it also goes back to that homogeneity, right? That if this is the McDonald's of furniture, I'm going to go against the grain and make a double, triple, extra pickle big Mac with no middle bun in it. Right, it's part of your identity at that point. You're saying, I'm a person who transforms things, but this is where it gets even more complicated

according to Jonathan. Within that group of people who wanted to completely transform something, some of them really wanted to maintain the AQI aesthetic. So they would say, well, this is something we want to say that could have come from AQI but didn't. So there's a sort of sense of, sure, you want to express yourself, but you're also trying to sort of outdo the doer. Like you're trying to outwit IKEA, right? Right. Out IKEA, IKEA.

All right, now we're going to lay the shelves down on their sides in a way that IKEA did not intend. We now rejoin this IKEA hack already in progress. To catch everyone up, we have built three Cadillac's shelves for mykea. We've laid them down on their sides in a kind of U. It's like my bed is a whale skeleton lying on its side and you're gonna be putting stuff in the rib cage of the skeleton.

That's what I'm going to be like. And we're gonna put doors, really heavy doors on top of the shelves as whereas where I'm going to lay down, go to sleepy by. You sound like an insane person. I know. I know. You're like Aquaman standing on top of a wild marine creature. This is, but this is what it's like. It's like, it's like, taming, you know. It's like taming the most placid beast in the known universe and Ikea shelf on its side. No, that's, but this is what I'm saying. This is, it isn't placid. It's us that is usually the placid.

Uh, okay, this is the best part. We're about to drill unsanctioned holes into a piece of a key. You're not sure. You're not going to take it back. You want to have it out of it. Oh, actually, yeah. Man, do the honors. Sure. So why is this your favorite part? I mean, I think it's just that for the longest time, you know, you're told that drilling holes where they're not supposed to go is destructive and wrong. And we were doing that, and it's still transgressive and you're crossing a boundary, but it's not a destruction anymore.

It's creation. It felt like for once I wasn't just saying, what's out there, which one on the menu do I want? We were making what we wanted. Yeah, but you were making what we wanted. Yeah, but you were still shopping at IKEA. True. Well, it's interesting, IKEA's response to this, right? It's not to shut down IKEA hackers.

Again, this is Daniela Rossner, who co-wrote that IKEA hacking paper. There's a lot more, almost support for hacking within the corporate world than there was, you know, five or six years ago. And I think part of that is corporations seeing that this adds to the process of kind of buying and recognizing the products. And yes, this is the moment in the story where we do the ironic tape to tape juxtaposition.

Maestro? Earlier this week, Swedish flatpack furniture manufacturer Ikea dealt a massive blow to the long-running fan blog IkeaHackers.net. According to a blog post published by Founder Jewel's Yapp, the site was issued a cease-and-desist order in March, alleging this. This is the news that we alluded to at the beginning. Around the same time that Sean and Jonathan were hacking together his bed, unbeknownst to them, a brand protection company wrote to the Queen Bee of IKEA HACTIM, the woman who runs IKEAHacker's .NET, Jewels YAP. Jewels isn't her real first name. The

letter basically said that IKEA was not amused, and that if Jewels didn't stop operating her website the way she was, she could be in big trouble. Hey, Jewels. Hi. Hi. How are you? I'm good. How are you? It wasn't until the news broke about the cease and desist letter that Jules agreed to talk to me. Yes. She lives in Malaysia when we talked by Skype. Before we got down to business, I was just curious how she thought up the site. So I was checking out a few home decor websites and I found a few IT hacks that were scattered around on the internet. And then that was when I thought,

how great it would be if I could see all these hacks in one place. No, and that was when Tara, the light box, just ran on and I knew I had to start it. So that was in 2006. And for some reason, only this year, 2014, March 12th to be precise, did jewels get an email? With the subject line IQ hackers,

notification of violation of trademark rights. Wow. Wow. So I felt my blood drain literally, you know, it was scary. So what did they want her to do? Hand over the domain name, stop using the IKEA trade marker,

anything trade marked by IKEA, which I think means even pictures of the furniture, and she'd have to close down her Twitter and Facebook accounts to and all the social media stuff. The thing that's ironic about this, the thing that I didn't understand right away was that Jules loves IKEA. I mean, she's just a huge fan.

I am, I guess. Superfan. It strikes me that it's like meeting a celebrity that you've always really loved and like that celebrity is really mean to you in some way. Yes, yeah, that was fast-closed, you know? I just felt like after that, you know. I had been given a restraining order by the celebrity. After Jules announced on her website that big changes might be coming to IKEA hackers,

the story went viral. People were pretty pissed off. Cory Doctoro, who blogs on Boyn Boyn, famously called the cease-and-assist letter, quote, steaming a bullsh** and quote. But at this point, Jewels was pretty much resigned. She thought the best thing she could do was just to comply and then transfer the hacks over

to another site, which didn't have IKEA's name on it. If nothing else, she was just grateful that so many people reacted so strongly to the news. So it was on a Friday night that I made the announcement. And the following week, I received a call from IKEA. From whom, at IKEA? Guy named Anders Westney. I hope I'm saying that right. He's with the business side of things as opposed to the legal side. He was saying that, well, the lawyers are there

to do their job, you know? And he also took a look at the letter of the CIS and the CIS letter. And he said that he didn't recognize I care in it. Really, he said that? Yes, he said that. He didn't have the spirit of the Bra, which is to make life better for everyone. And to that end, he told Jules that they wanted to find another way forward and try to figure

out how they can resolve things to come to some agreement. I seriously, when he called me, I was totally speechless. I was like, yeah, yeah. And inside me, I was screaming, you know, I was like, jumping, you know, if I could, I would, doing the Ikea dance. I was like crazy, you know, oh, and get this. As we're releasing this podcast, Jules is visiting Sweden and Holland, meeting face-to-face with representatives of Ikea. She's touring the Concept Center where their products are developed and then visiting

the very homeland where it all began. Oh my god. It's like she's tarly bucket visiting Willy Wonka's talk at factory. Yes, I am. No, it's equal home. I mean, do you get a sense that IKEA would ever truly partner with jewels and make her some sort of minister of hacking or whatever. I mean, what I've been saying is like, I can't imagine IKEA could possibly endorse any individual hacker hacking on the whole,

it's just too risky, you know? I mean, if something goes wrong, I mean, it would basically be sanctioning what amounts to a misuse of their products. Even though I will say that misuse feels wonderful. I have to tell you, Jules, I, the feeling of hacking together my Ikea bid, well, I and Jonathan being,

because it was really mostly him, but we, you know, created something. And that thing that we created is now something that I sleep on every night. Okay. It's just such a powerful feeling. There is actually a theory that one of the reasons why I care is so successful is because you have to make it yourself as in like you have to assemble it yourself. So if you are a certain sense of accomplishment or you know, I put together this Billy Bokeh level higher.

Alright, the final touch. We're gonna put the mattress onto my new IKEA bed. Does it fit? Does it fit? It fits! Oh boy, it's a bed! It's a bed, it's a real bed! I'm not just a loser bachelor sleeping on the floor anymore! I mean an actual bed! Oh boy! I'm lying on my new bed! It's so comfortable! He still sounds like a crazy person.

One more thing to add here. We also wrote to Anders Westney, the IKEA rep who reached out to Jewels' app saying, let's figure out a new way forward. He was very polite, but said that talking to us before talking to Jewels would be putting the cart before the horse. So in short, no comment. We'll have to wait for an update on IKEAHackers.net. Right, that's right. The steal is going to take us way up place to buy two things instead of six.

You are so smart. You're hacking the hack. Do you realize that you're hacking the hack? That's what hacking is. Oh, right. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Sean Cole with Sam Green's fan Katie Mingle, Avery Tropham and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW in San Francisco and produced out of

the offices of Arxine, home with some very handsomely hacked, expedited shelves in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. The full 99% invisible experience isn't just this episode you're hearing, I post links to cool things and details about office hours and live shows on Facebook. I also do that and you know, make jokes on Twitter at Roman Mars along with our team Sam listens, Katie Mingle and Troubleman. We're also on Tumblr, Instagram Flickers, SoundCloud and Spotify, but you're always welcome at our place at 99bi.org. Radio Tapio.

From PRX.