Impact on design

Icon, an upstart British design magazine with a cheekily subversive sensibility, has raised some eyebrows with the publication of its March 2005 issue. In it, the editors have proffered their “21 Most Influential” list, a compendium of “people who are changing the contemporary design landscape” as well as “products, organisations and ideas that everyone will be copying in the immediate future.”

So is the top spot claimed by some silver-haired titan of architecture, or maybe a brash wunderkind of product design? Do the editors reserve their ultimate plaudits for a brilliantly innovative hybrid car, a daring artists’ collective or a revolutionary CAD program?

Think again.

Think cobalt blue and canary yellow. Think throngs of weekend shoppers jostling one another to fill oversize carts with plastic wastebaskets, rag rugs and assembly-required TV stands. Think lingonberries and Swedish meatballs.

Think IKEA.

“If it wasn’t for IKEA,” the editors say, “most people would have no access to affordable contemporary design. The company has done more to bring about an acceptance of domestic modernity … than the rest of the design world combined.”

Their string of hosannas ends with a deep bow to the Swedish company’s founder, 78-year-old Ingvar Kamprad, who started IKEA back in 1943 and has grown it over six decades into a multibillion-dollar enterprise with more than 200 stores around the world: “It’s time to acknowledge that Ingvar Kamprad is the most influential tastemaker in the world today.”

If influence is defined in terms of sheer reach, there would seem to be little room for argument.

“IKEA’s not just in the U.K. and the U.S., but in Israel, Japan, Saudi Arabia,” says Ellen Lupton, curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York. “It’s bringing modern design to people of modest means. It’s the Bauhaus ideal made real,” she says, referring to the 1920s German movement that sought to democratize design.

Lupton – who says her IKEA furnishings blend quite nicely with her Eames pieces and Jean Prouve dining table – believes nevertheless that the company’s designs are not without limitations. “I don’t think every product they make is great,” she says, citing an inevitable “ephemerality” born of cheap materials and mechanized production.

But like the editors of Icon, she’s willing to give Kamprad and company their due when it comes to having had a monumental impact on contemporary design. “I think it’s spectacular that they’re able to reach these incredibly diverse cultures and appeal to them,” she says. “That’s what Modernism wanted to do. It wanted to be universal – but it never worked. This works.”

Universal appeal carries its own set of hazards, however. On Feb. 10, six people were sent to the hospital, one with stab wounds, after violence erupted at a midnight grand-opening sale at an IKEA in north London. More than 6,000 people, some of whom had begun lining up before noon, pressed, punched, kicked and scratched their way through the doors.

The 40 security guards hired for the event were overwhelmed by customers, several of whom literally duked it out over furnishings. One guard had his jaw dislocated when a customer took a swing at him. The store had to close 30 minutes after its gala opening event.

Terence Blacker, a columnist for the Independent, a London newspaper, darkly opined that the rioters had simply been overtaken by the flames of rampant consumerism. “Riots that occur through need are about to be replaced by their opposite: riots of unsatisfied excess,” he wrote.

Kieran Long, Icon’s deputy editor, finds it ironic that pandemonium attended the opening of a store whose aesthetic is the very essence of Nordic calm and reasonableness. The subtext of every IKEA store around the world, he says, is: ” ‘Look at us relaxed Scandinavians, we’re so comfortable with all of our streamlined stuff. You’re not. Get with it.’ “

Naming the company as the most influential force in the world of design, Long says, was both “provocative and blindingly obvious.” He agrees with Lupton that IKEA designs are uniquely successful at transcending barriers of class, culture and geography. But he’s not sure the company is consciously fulfilling any sort of Modernist-utopian covenant in doing so.

“The Bauhaus had a political agenda that IKEA doesn’t,” says Long. “IKEA is a big corporation. It’s there to make money. It doesn’t have a social program; it’s not out to change the way that people live.”

Consciously or not, however, IKEA has changed the way design is incorporated into the lives of middle-class urbanites (and suburbanites) around the world. By combining value with a global marketing and sales strategy, its products have achieved something like ubiquity.

A past issue of Icon, Long says, featured an article about a group of Icelandic designers who have “worked out that it’s actually cheaper for them to buy their basic plywood in the form of IKEA furniture. Because of its economy of scale, IKEA can make the finished products cheaper than (plywood) would cost in Iceland, where they don’t really have a lot of trees. So these guys just buy the pieces and then alter them.”

Not everyone, of course, is so keen on IKEA. In his column for the Independent, Blacker described the mammoth stores as “hellish,” and wondered “(h)ow many lives have been blighted by this organisation? How many marriages have foundered in its corridors or among the debris of a flat-pack item, scattered in despair across the floor of a kitchen?”

Speaking by telephone from London, Blacker said he can’t fathom why people would be willing to risk injury – or to injure others – over wood-veneer furniture, however sleekly designed.

“I personally would argue that those people were not making a great style statement,” he says of the rioters. “The idea that IKEA is bringing a level of sophistication to British consumers is slightly belied by the fact that they’re stabbing each other at the entrance to the shop.”