Surtido, a design firm based in Barcelona, recently challenged thirty-five designers to go to IKEA and come up with new products using only what they found at the store. The idea behind this project is that IKEA is not a place to buy finished disassembled furniture, but a supplier of raw materials.
Everything used in the designers products had to come from IKEA, including screws, tools, light bulbs, fabric, and anything else they needed to complete their product. While the idea of hacking IKEA products is not new, challenging thirty-five well-respected designers to make something within these constraints is.
This project forced already successful designers to step out of their comfort zone and think outside of the box, a skill that will be very useful for designers in the future. With sustainability and depleting resources on everyone’s mind, the ability to take dissimilar used parts and make them into something useful and new will be a valuable skill for all designers to have.
Many of the finished products have a unique homemade feel to them. While complicated many of the end results look like garage projects, something that anyone could assemble with a little visualization and practice. As designers we are coming into a world where it will be vital for designers to know how to think creatively and make something old into something new, or in this case something mass-produced into something unique and different.
Image: Lamp made out of IKEA parts. Designed by the Yonoh Design Group. See the rest of their work at http://www.yonoh.es/
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