Ikea Plans to Start Hacking Its Own Furniture
Our love of building things - and then rebuilding them - starts early. As young kids, we make towers out of Lincoln Logs. Turn LEGO spaceships into cars, tossing the directions aside. So when Ikea first introduced their build-it-yourself furniture, of course, adults would dream up new ways to totally remake it.
And boy, did they ever. Coffee tables turned into ottomans. Mirrors morphed into dining tables. And kitchen carts became anything but. This all quickly gained a name, too: "Ikea hacks."
The hacking started as a fringe trend that eventually worked its way up be to Pinterest-famous, but recently the concept reached a whole new level of mainstream: Ikea is planning to introduce official kits that encourage you to turn their furniture into stuff it was never actually intended to be.
Gizmodo reported on the news from Ikea's Democratic Design Day in Sweden, and offered the first photos of Ikea's plans for the line, like a kit that turned a stool into a high-back chair (above). Not quite as groundbreaking as the overhaul hacking concept, but still - this is very new stuff.
We'll be interested to see what other kits Ikea offers (may we suggest plans for built-in bookcases?), but there's also something about this that totally makes our heads spin. Does it really count as a "hack" if Ikea is the one that suggesting the hacking? Are hacks no longer cool now that they've gone corporate? Will furniture DIYers hack the hacks? Whoa. Meta.
[via Gizmodo
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