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Designers are creative brokers in compiling, assimilating and recombining knowledge economies in new ways. A creative broker then synthesizes ideas from disparate fields and transmits them in novel ways. IKEA consumers describe themselves in similar ways.IKEA is the materialization of inspiration.

PAULI NE GARVE Y

Consuming IKEA: Inspiration as Material Form

ntroductionSince its launch of furniture retail in 1965, IKEA as a transnational corporation is variously projected as a purveyor of either accessible design or a standardized flatpack “monolithic tyranny of aesthetics” (Hartman 2009: 492). IKEA could be seen as a new effervescence of the ‘international style’, perpetuating homogenous domestic envi-

ronments on a global scale; it is commonly projected as ‘everywhere the same’, lacking easily identifiable forms of specific local articulation. People readily subscribe to this view, comparing IKEA Malaysia to its equivalent in Moscow without pausing for breath. But the very accessibility for which it is credited is often articulated as double-edged, such as encouraging transience, facilitating

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waste, valorizing the superficial over the real. In a recent article, for example, it is argued that IKEA perpetuates solitary and individualistic practices through the pursuance of fictional DIY identities in the home (Hartman 2007). In this argument, IKEA is not only a noun but a verb: ‘IKEAization’ we are told is “[…] necessarily a disengagement with the collective sphere, a sense that the most beneficial work is carried out when one is sheltered from, rather than an active participant in, social reality” (2007: 493). Bright and breezy IKEA merchandise, Hartman suggests, wallpapers over the fissures in contradictory self- construction and sociopolitical unrest. The collective is left behind in transitory, solitary fantasies.

This paper offers an alternative perspective in suggesting that set within the practices of IKEA visitation in Stockholm one finds a surprising congruence of collectivity and inspiration as relational and materialized entities. Through an anthropological study of IKEA consumption, 48 interviews with householders were conducted in and around the world’s largest flagship store located in ‘Kungens Kurva’ (King’s Curve) in the southern suburbs of the Swedish capital. Covering a staggering area of 56,200 m2, the Swedish IKEA store is the engine behind the Nordic countries’ largest market place in Skärhomen. My research aim was to follow furniture from shop floor to domestic setting in various locations in Stockholm and its suburbs. Eight months fieldwork with householders in Stockholm is currently being complemented with comparative research underway in Dublin’s ‘Ballymun’. The comparative approach allows salient notions such as inspiration to be placed under critical focus.

Inspiration is a dominant motif in IKEA sales rhetoric and conforms to twin emphases on innovation and expansion within the corporate environment on the one hand (see Suchman 2007), and continued engagement with the shopper on the other. Management opinion and in-house literature valorizes the importance of inspiration but imputes it to the shopping public, when this public is given the necessary resources. To be inspired is suggestive of a process moving between external prompts to internal states, or conversely identified as a ‘flow’ moving outwards from an internal source. This interconnectivity, however, is frequently seen as an essentialized abstraction such as in renditions of the ‘eureka moment’. Following this logic, inspiration is buried deep in individual experience and prodded into consciousness by some random external event. I argue alternatively that inspiration gives name to a variety of related forms but can be primarily contemplated as processual, distributed, and materialized. Inspiration here does not necessarily imply transformation but rather gives name to a contemplation of possibilities. It is this contemplation of possibilities that links the IKEA showroom and its suggestion of absent presences, ‘spatial effigies’ (Sandberg 2003), or unspecified others to notions of inspiration as ultimately linked to aggregate experience.

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Sweden is an apposite location for such research where there has been a significant traditional alliance between design, domesticity, and state policy. The recent his-tory of Swedish housing is one of standardization: Until the 1990s, state hous-ing provision entailed an explicit design dimension. Such design involved close measurement of domestic activities to facilitate the most efficient use of space. Other important housing conditions were based on access to direct sunlight, room climate, sound isolation, electric installations, elevators, building heights, and complementary buildings and patios (Eriksson 2000). In addition, precise measurements resulted from studies of domestic activities such as guidelines as to height or width of kitchen worktops or distances between stove and kitchen sink. The result was a series of enforced architectural norms, not only endorsed by the state but proscriptive for the building industry to procure state (munici-pal) funding. Such efforts were directed to managing domestic spaces, standard-izing sizes and shapes of rooms, and facilitating storage in tight spaces. If design has donned the label ‘modern’ (Attfield 2000), design has been modern in Swe-den since at least the 1930s. Here design is not an adjunct to everyday life; it has been part of active, political intervention with the promise of social betterment throughout the 20th century (see Lindqvist 2009: 51). Characteristically for Scandinavian countries, the locus for quality of life is centered on the home.

The IKEA showroomWithin design consultancy and other ‘cultural industries’ one finds focus

on creativity, creative inspiration, or innovation as problematic (Suchman 2007). Reimer and Leslie point out “[…] work in design history and design studies often has rested upon assumptions about the creativity of individuals” (Dorst and Cross 2001; Heskett 1980, quoted in Reimer and Leslie 2008). However, as Sunley et al. remark, although industries linked to design are often seen as “inherently innovative and creative” (2008: 677) there is little understanding as to how innovation operates. They suggest instead that “[…] innovation and creativity are not just the result of inspired acts by isolated individuals but an inherently social process: what is innovative depends on existing social norms” (Woodman et al. 1993, quoted in Sunley et al. 2008: 685). Elaborating on this proposal, the authors argue that creativity is inspired from a variety of context and knowledge flows. Designers are “creative brokers” in compiling, assimilating, and recombining knowledge economies in new ways (Sunny et. al.: 685). A creative broker then synthesizes ideas from disparate fields and transmits them in novel ways. Interestingly, IKEA consumers often describe themselves along similar lines.

In 2009, the 301st IKEA store opened in Dublin. Its interior design manager who oversees the ‘visual merchandisers’ and ‘graphical communicators’ describes a store that is projected as “inspirational, aspirational and ultimately

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functional” (Cullen 2009). In this respect, the inspirational theme of the store is, at least, in keeping with its Swedish equivalent. The interior manager in Stockholm elaborated more fully:

The visual aim is that we want the people to get inspired; the home furnishing knowledge differentiates us from (named competitors). We work hard with a function, what are the dreams that people have. To provide tips, inspire, make impact, create emotional reaction. Maybe you hate it or maybe you like it, but it should stir it up, to either love or hate it. You might hate the last room but love the next one.

When pressed as to the means and measure of this inspirational injection, this manager pointed to the store’s dynamic display practices, and also to the catalog. Most prominent are the showrooms that provide a type of ‘living-history theatre’ to a spectating audience (see Sandberg 2003: 219). On arrival escalators carry shoppers directly to the third floor, where one must make one’s way back down passing a tableaux of staged rooms furnished to accommodate particular groups

FIGURE 1 Family Photographs: IKEA showrooms encourage an impression of absent occupants.

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based on the local demographic. Nothing can be purchased here – frenetic accumulation is deferred to the basement area. Instead, the displays run in circles, while large glass walls allow the shopper to view lower and upper floors. One first encounters the living rooms, followed by other living spaces such as bedrooms, offices, and kitchens where one is provided with typical family scenarios. Inhabitants are continuously implied in large floor-to-ceiling posters, for instance two men cooking together under a sign “we live in 25m squared.” Or more subtly, suggested by photos of babies with young couples (suggestive of parents) or elderly women (the granny).

There are photographs of other fictional family members too, knitting in bowls, and books on shelves. Single individuals, couples with children, typical household pursuits and/or hobbies are implied in these rooms. Specific interests – or target groups – are alluded to through car magazines on bookshelves or provision for adult leisure or learning. Children’s play too is catered for through the placement of specific furnishings and suggested use of storage. The rooms are effective through their suggestion of absent presences or “[…] of oblique access to the living scene of a missing person” (Sandberg 2003: 3), such as in one bed-room where a breakfast tray sits on the bed, as if someone has just got up, while a baby’s cot stands in the corner.

IKEA showrooms can be compared to traps (see Gell 1998): They almost seem to jostle to capture attention, draw browsers in, engage and stimulate. Dis-tinctions between participating in the domestic-like environment and mere browsing meld as individuals interact with the furnishing or read the tags labeled ‘tips’. Here one finds a curious form of participant observation or corporeal expe-rience that long predates contemporary department stores. As Sandberg shows, Swedish museum curators were prescient in recognizing that mediated immer-sion in a space provides “[…] the promise of a closer, ‘inside’, surround-style experience that turns viewers into participants yet does so not by eliminating the display boundary but simply making it less conspicuous” (Sandberg 2003: 224).

Such mass interaction with domestic arrangements is mistakenly branded as solitary. The rooms are uninhabited of course, but the implied occupants of these living spaces are not entirely absent either. Rather, they are peopled in the

FIGURE 2 Knitting needles suggest domestic activities.

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presence of householders milling about, touching, testing, comparing, and otherwise providing the injection of ‘family’ that the scenes might otherwise lack. Parents refer to their children lying on beds in IKEA showrooms in amused tones, as if they are being somehow transgressive. In fact, IKEA management does not only tolerate customers sitting on beds, sofas, or at tables, it positively encourages it. In the Dublin store customer interaction with show pieces is measured in color codes: The more people physically locate themselves in, on, and around exhibits the more successful they are deemed to be. Behind these practices is the framework of ‘inspiration’, a nebulous idea based on the co- location of people and scene, envisioning oneself in these spaces, physically interacting with the furnishing, and somehow emotionally responding to them.

Consumers are both the subjects and objects of this visual and tactile experience. A man lounges on a sofa gazing absent-mindedly at the television, switched off. After a while, he rests his arm above his head, deep in thought, as if settling down for the evening. Around him is the hum of animated activity: excited children and worn parents, any amount of browsing and speculating, people are sitting on sofas, opening drawers and gazing in mirrors, all immersed in the collective project of domestic contemplation. These individuals are not only viewing the rooms, they are placing themselves and, crucially, other people in these environments. One Dublin man – who has an interest in perusing high-end design magazines – finds this reiteration an unnecessary distraction in the

FIGURE 3 Breakfast tray on bed in IKEA showrooms in Stockholm.

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IKEA catalog. “Get the people away,” he says while browsing through his catalog with me. He absentmindedly waves his hand about his head in irritation, as if swatting a bee or another annoyance to his concentration. Trips to IKEA alterna-tively, and essentially, imply collective activity to such an extent that shop floor workers recounted to me, on my first day of in-store research, of occasional elderly visitors that come to IKEA everyday simply to connect with people.

Social life at IKEAIn Stockholm, IKEA merchandise and its various appendages are continu-

ously part of one’s peripheral vision, in both public and private spaces. From the small IKEA signature furnishings, such as lamps and bookcases immediately identifiable on arrival to homes, to blue and yellow bags that are convenient hold-alls for laundry or bulky goods, IKEA is part of the socio-political weave of standardized housing and national imaginaries that make-up recitations of the ‘typical’ household.

Behind the scenes as well as on the shop floor, staff offices encourage an ethos of collectivity. In Dublin, in-house posters remind employees that IKEA “sides with the many.” From early on the founder – Ingvar Kamprad – under-scored the importance of family as a collective metaphor for staff and as his ‘primary consumer base’, with female shoppers constituting “[…] the majority of IKEA’s visitors, who totaled 583 million in 2007” (Lindqvist 2009: 55). A marketing manager in the Swedish office in Helsingborg claimed that 80% of Swedes visit an IKEA store at least once a year. The fact that it is directly linked to Ingvar Kamprad is of immense importance to the national market. An annual trust barometer 1 compiled by academics at the University of Gothenburg charts public trust in national institutions. For several years, I was told, IKEA has ranked among the most trusted institutions in Sweden, far surpassing confidence in the government or media. Here, in the corridors of the retail service office, democracy or equality is the name given to this mass appeal. Elsewhere the normative potential of IKEA merchandise can pose a problematic balancing act.

Young couples, families, and students are continually nominated as stereo- typical shoppers and often it is the process of extraction – divesting oneself of ‘IKEA’ as a process – that some respondents have professed to undergo as they get older, earn more money, or develop personal taste. While IKEA products are generally recognized as acceptable quality and good design, having too much ‘IKEA’ – often named as an abstract entity – is suggestive of an inability to be an individual or show personal history. One woman expressed some embarrassment about having a living room planned by IKEA interior designers and completely outfitted with its furniture: “You shouldn’t live the brand, you know,” she says. Against this background, interviewees reiterated domestic acquisition as a non-solitary endeavor and emphasized the comfort of company over the

1 IKEA retains pole position with 78 percent indicating a lot/quite a lot of trust, and Ingvar Kamprad, the founder and outward face of the furniture giant, has precisely the same high result. The Trust Barometer is an annual measurement of trust in social institutions, parties, the mass media, and companies. The Baro meter was designed by Lennart Weibull and Sören Holmberg, professors at the University of Gothen-burg, in conjunction with the market research company TNS Gallup, 2008.

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loneliness of the lone visit. Such comments were interspersed with references to hanging out, browsing, daytrips, or family outings to the store. And just as a ‘daytrip’ suggests both time and space devoted to leisure, respondents consistently point to the necessity of IKEA visitation with co-present others. Lucas, a thirty-eight-year-old father of two, suggested he doesn’t go alone: “IKEA is a family thing, it’s like an outing now.” Other locals reminisced on trips as young teenagers, when they would pop in with friends for lunch after (and possibly during) school. Per, a ticket officer in the Stockholm underground, complained about everything being the same in IKEA, but commented that at least “everyone can be the same together.” Finally, a middle-aged lawyer described household shopping trips as a nice way to socialize with her teenage daughters.

x Linda: But I like small things – take the girls and go for a late evening shopping for a few hours. It is a nice way to talk ’cause we know exactly what we want and what we look for, it is a way to socialize. If someone at work was to say I have my car today and I will go to IKEA for lunch, would someone like to join me, you would always fill the car because everyone would like to join, because it is a way of socializing.

x Pauline: Is that different from other stores, where else might you go?x Berit: Well, no one would suggest that we go to a different store. No, no

one suggests a different store. IKEA is not a store, it is a concept (laughs). IKEA is... IKEA.

But considerations surrounding collectivity extend beyond questions of normative domestic arrangements. Take Linda, for example. Linda is a woman in her mid-thirties who worked as a school teacher but had recently returned to third level education when I met her. It was during one discussion that she expressed an issue that I began to recognize as common. It is not so much the store itself, or the queues, the maze-like channeling of people, or the size that she complained about. Rather, it was the potential to spotlight the quality of her own relationships that came under scrutiny. To explain her point she described some friends who had recently divorced and, with some difficulty, had gone to IKEA to purchase furnishings for a new apartment. Referring to the ex-partner of a friend, she said:

x Linda: He was feeling the same experience as I had of being single and not really enjoying it but having to get things that are only for one. It can be a nice feeling too because you can get things that you really want for yourself. But you have to be in that state of mind to enjoy it, especially in IKEA where people are holding hands and all lovey-dovey and planning for their future together. So it can be a major blow, I mean, if you are not quite ‘there’ in yourself. I have actually brought my best friend a couple

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times to hold my hand and walk around a little bit. Which sounds ridiculous but it helps.

x Pauline: So would you avoid going there if you were single and not quite happy about it?

x Linda: I have never seen a single person walking around – I’ve probably seen single people but, you know, a person walking around by themselves in IKEA. It is always two and two, or you see people my age with a parent, like a guy with his mother. Women with toddlers, always in pairs, it is a very social thing. It can be hard to go in there if you don’t feel… prepared for it.

Linda continued that at certain points in her own life trips to IKEA felt positively alienating. In discussing these emotional responses, she made no reference to the actual furnishing on show but described in some detail the people around her and the impact that their planning had on her. Interaction with in-store strangers would not necessarily alleviate this feeling, she qualified but added that on exceptional occasions people can be “quite flirty” there.

Inspiration As Reimer and Leslie point out: “Design is rarely an isolated activity: it

emerges from a wider field of relationships and knowledges spanning an entire chain or network” (Leslie and Reimer 2006: 322, quoted in Reimer and Leslie 2008: 150). Despite this “[…] the individual designer as ‘hero’ is constructed and reinforced through a range of other realms, including the tendency for design educational programmes to feature an identifiable design canon…” (Julier 2000: 38–39, quoted in Reimer and Leslie 2008: 150). Replacing the designer as hero, Hartman argues that the lone IKEA consumer is designing a self-as-hero in which the fantasy it engenders is an alternative to everyday realities. This fantasy is not “[…] of actually being a successful young urban architect but the idea that one is plugged in to a world that consists of effortless modern design” (2009: 487, emphasis in original). He suggests one might view “the system of tableaux […] as a sort of mirror, but one that sends back liberating, desired images rather than real ones – ‘I am not a bureaucrat but an artist,’ says one; ‘I am not a worker but a writer,’ says another; and so on” (2009:487). The struggle that Hartman identifies is one of self-construction, a type of exploration and creation of desired-for identities that are unattainable in real life. IKEA, he suggests, provides a gloss of fulfillment over real disenchantment. The sinister complement to this situation is that real social change is subverted. As an embodiment of the superficial and transitory, IKEA consumption, he contends, is more closely likened to “eating and excretion, rather than collecting” (2009: 495).

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For my respondents, the struggle as detailed by Hartman represented something quite different. The IKEA showroom provides an interactive space for the con-sultation, browsing, and occasional keen awareness of other domestic arrange-ments, other people, other couples and families. Unlike the presentation of IKEA products as a visualization of how one would really like to be, how one sees one-self as one ‘really is’ (not a bureaucrat but really a writer), the warehouse space reiterates collective domestic endeavor, through which one must negotiate a unique presence. In IKEA publications, on the other hand, the suggestion of the comfortingly normative is very present in IKEA literature. In 2008, for example, there was heavy emphasis on the kitchen being a new arena for improvement. On the contents page of a publication aimed at members of ‘IKEA family’ entitled IKEA Family Live (2008) the shopper is urged to make small changes even if time and money is limited. The word inspiration features here and significantly refers to inspiration as channeled through other people:

...sometimes the dream kitchens displayed in magazines are so removed from our own reality that attempting the change will feel hopeless. Perhaps you have bought the kitchen of your dreams just to discover that it does not work the way it should in your everyday life. That is what we at this magazine are hoping to help you with. To inspire and encourage the desire for change. Or to have another go at something that did not turn out very well. To suggest changes that are possible even with limited time and funds. And who to better inspire us than other people, all around the world, showing you how they have done things. If they can, then so can you! 2 (Brandt 2008: 3)

Despite this valorization of the aggregate, for many a home decorated completely in IKEA merchandise – or smacking too closely as ‘designed’ – is named precisely as an example of a lack of personality. Indeed, in a best-selling Swedish novel 3 recommended to me by interviewees, one finds an example of an absence of personal interest in the home typified by the heroine’s single visit to IKEA and her lack of consideration for her purchases while fitting out her apartment. Such examples underscore how it is not necessarily nor essentially the actual IKEA furnishing that is at issue here but rather the consultative process, the manner in which furnishings are acquired and integrated into existent domestic forms that counts.

Part of this package springs from the circumstances that frequently surround home provisioning. IKEA shopping often centers on changes in key moments in one’s life: setting up home for the first time, entering university, moving in with others, or occasionally in periods of marriage breakdown. Inexpensive furniture in the IKEA package is often turned to at such moments to fill the hole that a new domestic environment creates. Fulfilling this role renders

2 Ibland kan drömköken som visas i tidningar vara så långt ifrån vår egen verklighet att det känns lönlöst att ens påbörja en förändring. Du kanske har köpt ditt drömkök bara för att upptäcka att det inte fungerar som det ska i din vardag. Det är här vi vill hjälpa till med vår tidning. Inspirera och ge lust till att påbörja en förändring. Eller ta nya tag i något som inte blivit bra. Visa på förändringar som är möjliga även om tiden och plånboken är begränsad. Och vem kan ge oss bättre inspirati-on än andra människor, runt om i världen, som visar hur dom har gjort det. Kan dom kan du!

3 In the Millennium Series of crime novels by Stieg Larsson.

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IKEA ubiquitous in Stockholm, where even occasional television drama suggests romantic commitment through images of couples upwardly ascending IKEA escalators.

What emerges therefore is a mix of notions that combine the quality of inspiration and the process of consultation that is inflected through significant others. In recent decades and for various reasons, IKEA stores increasingly personalize its innovative designers. The impetus for this measure may not have come from management originally, but nevertheless it bolsters an image of innovative personages and on-going change. The particularizing process is unmistakable here: Large images and quotes dangle over specific products. Detailed descriptions are carried over mundane household utensils. The multiplicity of intentions, designs, and ideas – while dispersed and individualized by in-house advertising – is, however, congealed and distributed in material products for my informants. Inspiration is identified as residing in specific things. The canny solutions channeled into ordinary products are carried into domestic environments where reference is made to aggregate of designers – ‘IKEA design-ers’ as a collective rather than individual personages. In other words, despite a process of design individualization by IKEA marketing strategies, my informants respond to inspiration as an environment and one that is constituted through collective presences. Moreover, these presences both imply co-present others as well as a set of design intentions materialized in goods. These intentions, such as storage ‘solutions’ are purchased and carried through to domestic spaces where the design project continues. It is the nature of this dual experience that is inspi-ration, not inspirational.

Conclusion As a transnational corporation with a global reach, it is all too easy to lapse

into an assumption of IKEA as an abstract entity. And in the abstract one might gain an impression of specific shop floors as vacant spaces devoid of people. And yet many people cognizant of flatpack rationisalization have also themselves experienced the milling about, the fingering, touching, and smelling, the lengthy queues, maze-like stores, and frustrating re-assembly. As Sarah Pink argues with reference to Wenger’s work, the experience of knowing is “[…] specific, engaged, active and ‘experiential’ ” (Wenger 1998: 141; Pink 2009: 34). She continues, since knowing is experiential it is “[…] inextricable from our sensorial and material engagements with the environment and is as such emplaced knowing” (2009: 34).

IKEA design is not cutting-edge, but even by virtue of its attribution as design, it implies a designating role (see Drazin and Garvey 2009). One of the ways in which this point is articulated is through the idea that IKEA is Svensson, for the Average Joe, or simply just for everybody. Here the seemingly ‘everybody’

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is present in the milling about, moving and discussing, touching and comparing, sitting, testing, trying and viewing, which is carried through to a myriad of ordinary homes, hotels, community centers, and dispersed public buildings throughout the country. Inspiration in IKEA as a set of intentions does not have a separate reality from its canny solutions and human immersion.

In a recent campaign in Stockholm, the store launched the 2008 / 09 catalog under the heading of an espousal of diversity. The images used to advertise this were made of hundreds of tiny images making up one face. The differences of the aggregate combine, we assume, into a single vision of cohesion, the individual collective made from hundreds of small divergences. The constitution of ordinary people from diverse products enhances this collective feel that the IKEA catalog promotes under the rubric of democracy.

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