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# Thoughts While Building an IKEA Alex File Cabinet
- URL: https://www.bramadams.dev/202302192249/
- Published: 2023-02-21T04:47:21.000Z
- Updated: 2023-02-21T04:47:21.000Z
- Description: I spent two hours building two IKEA Alex drawers and had a lot of thoughts along the way, from questioning the instruction manuals to wondering why they don't tell you to batch things.
- Author: Bram Adams
- Tags: humor, audio-enabled, essays

## Audio Companion

Thoughts While Building an IKEA Alex File Cabinet Audio Companion

0:00

/3:20

1×

*Total time building two Alex drawers: \~2hours*

**15 minutes in:** Whoever is the motherfucker who makes instruction manuals[\[1\]](#fn1) for IKEA is a sadist of the highest order. Who are these Keith Haring looking motherfuckers? Why are they so condescending?

![https://bram-adams.ghost.io/content/images/2023/02/keith-haring.png](https://storage.ghost.io/c/0c/cc/0ccc9a8d-054a-4056-b11e-e1bfbbb66387/content/images/2023/02/keith-haring.png)

keith haring.png

![https://bram-adams.ghost.io/content/images/2023/02/ikea.png](https://storage.ghost.io/c/0c/cc/0ccc9a8d-054a-4056-b11e-e1bfbbb66387/content/images/2023/02/ikea.png)

ikea.png

**19 minutes in:** Nothing like some particleboard in the lungs to wake you up. I probably should've wore a mask for this…

**34 minutes in:** Fuck it I’ll just hit it with a hammer

**38 minutes in:** If you’re going to make such a small distinction about screws that look *the exact same*, why put them in the same fucking bag???[\[2\]](#fn2)

**44 minutes in:** The instruction to put it upside down was a great call. *Author's note: This brief joy was*  
*immediately canceled out by having to turn the weird screw from the bottom.*

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**44 minutes in:** Why don’t instruction manuals tell you to batch things, do the honestly expect people to do these one by one? Looks like *someone* got stuck on bubble sort at school ;)

## IKEA Engineers Should Unionize

> A newspaper in Sweden described Ikea \[furniture assembly\] as **something between civil engineering and captaining a submarine**, and I think that’s a good description,” says Allan Dickner, Ikea’s deputy packaging manager. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gss3mfe99vd5kfdr8q25m8s4?ref=bramadams.dev))

> **there’s one foolproof method for turning Ikea rage into grudging respect: *assembling almost any other brand of furniture.*** After an hour spent comparing piles of ambiguous components against an assembly diagram that looked like a misfiled mimeograph from Area 51, I somehow produced a HomeGoods end table—as well as a surging curiosity about how Ikea designs its own packaging and instructions, which now seemed positively Eamesian in comparison. **To adapt Winston Churchill’s famous quip, Ikea may be the worst form of ready-to-assemble product design we have—except for all the others.** ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gss3nbmetm606kncar9zwj0q?ref=bramadams.dev))

> According to Allan Dickner, whatever your most frustrating Ikea experience is, it could have been worse—and most likely was for the packaging engineer who test-assembled even more complicated versions of the product before arriving at the optimized design that you unboxed on your living room floor. **“We had one furniture piece, a type of wardrobe, which originally had over 400 fittings and screws to hold it together,”** Dickner says. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gss3pbd2xq0gz2nja47f8993?ref=bramadams.dev))

For 400 screws that wardrobe better open straight to Narnia, shit.

> Continuity, meanwhile, is what separates Ikea’s instructions—even the maddening ones—from those of other brands. The Lego-like, frame-by-frame illustrations are based on construction drawings, digital snapshots, 3-D models, and videos of test assemblies. **Designers take pains to render each successive picture from a single, unchanging point-of-view (mimicking that of the customer), so that confusing rotations or perspective changes are minimized** and the customer can stay oriented more easily as he or she moves back and forth between the booklet and the parts. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gss3s0pxdyfp0sq7vs4f7xjk?ref=bramadams.dev))

\*Turns on isometric view mode in Blender once\*

> They may not be pleasant, but they are at least rational and comprehensible—even sympathetic—by design. **Think of that big-nosed “Ikea man” who’s shown calling the company when he gets stuck. He’s not mocking or condescending**. If anything, he represents some designer at Ikea who has already gone through exactly what you’re going through now on your living room floor: half-quizzically glancing from instruction booklet to pile-of-parts and back, hoping for the best, but trusting that it will all, at the very least, make sense. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gss3smmz8a6bf9gwjw35ebrw?ref=bramadams.dev))

I disagree.

### The Moving Sofa Problem

> “It would be quite stupid to design a package that’s flat and efficient but **won’t fit into a small elevator or staircase,” Dickner explains. “It sounds ridiculous, but in the Un**ited Kingdom, that was one of the most frequent reasons for a customer returning a product.” He adds that global package designs are tested in Japan and South Korea “because those are the customers who live in the smallest spaces.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gss3r1nk90dbva1jrprt54th?ref=bramadams.dev))

The Europeans get math(s)ed by their hella small flats.

![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/Hammersley_sofa_animated.gif)

([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gss3vg6zjcedcvm98v1jpjj7?ref=bramadams.dev))

> the **moving sofa problem** or **sofa problem** is a two-dimensional idealisation of real-life furniture-moving problems and asks for the rigid two-dimensional shape of largest [area](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area?ref=bramadams.dev) that can be maneuvered through an L-shaped planar region with legs of unit width.The area thus obtained is referred to as the *sofa constant*. **The exact value of the sofa constant is an [open problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsolved%5Fproblems%5Fin%5Fmathematics?ref=bramadams.dev)** ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gss3v8gzhdgp5wpaqqzv1mqp?ref=bramadams.dev))

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1. He's made quite the compelling career for himself…[202301051907](https://bram-adams.ghost.io/202301051907?ref=bramadams.dev)
2. products like these make me appreciate well made tech products even more, tbh [202301130214](https://bram-adams.ghost.io/202301130214?ref=bramadams.dev)