Post-Purchase Product Alteration

It’s a phenomenon that Ikea took to the retail world, and now it’s coming full-circle. A growing collective of global “hackers” as they’re called are dismantling products and re-aligning the parts as they see fit. Take Winnie Lam, who created a Sundae Toppings footstool, fashioned from a few bags of cotton pompoms hot-glued to an Ikea stool. Or Christine Domanic who built a new bench from an Ikea sidetable.

An article from the NYTimes explores this growing subset a bit further:

Do-it-yourselfers and technogeeks, tinkerers, artists, crafters and product and furniture designers, the hackers are united only by their perspective, which looks upon an Ikea Billy bookcase or Lack table and sees not a finished object but raw material: a clean palette yearning to be embellished or repurposed. They make a subset of an expanding global D.I.Y. movement, itself a huge tent of philosophies and manifestoes including but not confined to anticonsumerism, antiglobalism, environmentalism and all-purpose iconoclasm.

One particular hacker has taken this global collective to the web in a blog titled ikeahacker.  Most of the work she captures is created by people more focused on the pleasures of reinvention, and on modifying Ikea’s wares to suit their homes and personalities. It’s all about thinking outside the box (literally.)