Shift your focus away from Apple, design enthusiasts: IKEA is the new hotspot for innovation
The "Magical Patterns" exhibition at Edinburgh's Dovecot Studios, running until January, celebrates IKEA as a pioneer in democratizing design. This exhibition showcases how IKEA's ethos of making stylish, functional, and affordable products available to a broad audience has reshaped people's interaction with interior design.
IKEA's approach contrasts with brands like Apple, which focus on design but often target a premium market with high-end, integrated tech products. IKEA demonstrates design for everyone, focusing on simplicity, affordability, and mass production, thus inviting a wide range of people to participate in good design. In comparison, Apple demonstrates democratization through user-friendly technology but tends to maintain exclusivity through pricing and ecosystem control.
The exhibition illustrates this by displaying patterns and designs that can be easily produced, adapted, and accessed. These designs reflect IKEA’s influence on encouraging self-expression, experimentation, and everyday usability in home interiors. This is a form of democratized design that contrasts with the more specialized or luxury market approaches, such as Apple’s, which democratize design by making sophisticated technology approachable but less accessible from a price point.
One of the textiles showcased in the exhibition is Ida Pettersson Preutz's gloriously odd broccoli pattern. Once considered too wild for customers in the 1980s, it has now been revived as a classic. Anyone can buy this pattern without a hint of pretension.
Assembling IKEA products can make the consumer feel like a co-creator, creating a personal connection with the furniture. IKEA has been reshaping design itself, focusing on making design affordable and mass-market without being bland. Walking through an IKEA showroom showcases masterclasses in space-saving, color-matching, and practicality.
IKEA's designs aim to make life easier, not just to impress other designers. They address real-life problems such as fitting a life into a small apartment or storing vinyl records. The company's willingness to experiment makes Apple's tiny design iterations look timid.
The exhibition, which features 180 textiles spanning decades of playful, democratic design from IKEA, also highlights that IKEA has been democratizing design since 1943. The Randig Banan stripes, once considered too wild for customers in the 1980s, have been revived as a classic.
Apple's design vision, while beautiful, is limiting compared to IKEA's approach that considers homes as spaces for living, not posing. An IKEA kitchen may not win a showroom beauty contest, but it allows for cooking in surroundings that people genuinely love.
In summary, the "Magical Patterns" exhibition celebrates IKEA as a key driver of design democratization by emphasizing affordable aesthetics and practical innovation, promoting broader participation in design compared to Apple's more technology-driven democratization for primarily premium users.
- The "Magical Patterns" exhibition, running until January, celebrates IKEA as a pioneer in democratizing design, showcasing how IKEA's approach has reshaped people's interaction with interior design.
- IKEA's ethos is making stylish, functional, and affordable products available to a broad audience, demonstrating design for everyone by focusing on simplicity, affordability, and mass production.
- In comparison, Apple tends to maintain exclusivity through pricing and ecosystem control, but democratizes design by making sophisticated technology approachable, albeit less accessible from a price point.
- One of the textiles showcased in the exhibition is Ida Pettersson Preutz's gloriously odd broccoli pattern, originally considered too wild for customers, but now easily accessible and revived as a classic without pretension.
- Assembling IKEA products can make the consumer feel like a co-creator, creating a personal connection with the furniture and showcasing masterclasses in space-saving, color-matching, and practicality.
- IKEA's designs aim to make life easier, addressing real-life problems such as fitting a life into a small apartment or storing vinyl records, while Apple's design focus is often on aesthetics rather than practical solutions.
- The "Magical Patterns" exhibition, featuring 180 textiles spanning decades of playful, democratic design from IKEA, also highlights that IKEA has been democratizing design since 1943, even reviving once-controversial patterns like the Randig Banan stripes as classics.
