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Comment by InclinedPlane | Hacker News Reader

IKEA assembly is a trivial task, the fact that it's perceived as otherwise is more an indication of the functional illiteracy and lack of basic mechanical knowledge in the population than anything else. Nevertheless, the fact that IKEA furniture is insanely popular would tend to indicate that many do not find assembly to be overly difficult.

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IKEA assembly is trivial for most humans. But that is not the point of the article.

The point of the article is that it is non-trivial for humans to make robots able to do what they can do easily themselves.

The IKEA task was likely chosen because it is something many people have personal experience with, which makes for better public understanding and engagement with the underlying engineering work being displayed.

Yes, assembling Ikea furniture is very easy, but memes are not really based on reality. Maybe it's the opposite.

Mayonnaise is the most popular sauce ever; yet the meme is that it's "disgusting".

Almost everybody has Ikea at home; yet the meme is that it's impossible to assemble.

Maybe memes are trying to tell us something... but I'm not sure what.

memes are not really based on reality

We should take this back to the original formulation of "meme" by Richard Dawkins.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme#Origins

Maybe it's the opposite.

Memes, in the academic sense, are just ideas that can propagate very well. Ideas don't have to be true to propagate.

Mayonnaise is the most popular sauce ever; yet the meme is that it's "disgusting".

Disgust is a very useful emotion to aid in the propagation of an idea. Outrage is another.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

https://hbr.org/2016/05/research-the-link-between-feeling-in...

Assembling Ikea furniture is easy in the sense that most people can do it eventually, but it's kind of tedious, easy to make an annoying mistake that requires backtracking and often stressful. People elsewhere in the thread mentioned assembling it with kids around, and often you're putting it together at a hectic time because you've just moved or need the furniture ready and the house clean before having guests, etc. Enough people have had these experiences that the meme is popular.

I don't personally care for mayonnaise. I think the memes are popular precisely because mayonnaise is so popular. A lot of the anti-mayo memes I've seen complaining about mayonnaise are about finding it where you don't expect it or ordering sandwiches without it and still getting it. There are fewer memes ranting about less common ingredients like Buffalo sauce or hummus because you don't have to go out of your way to avoid those.

Yeah. It’s usually fairly straightforward and is pretty easy for small pieces. Something like a large dresser though, while perhaps not being hard, can be rather tedious to plow through.

True Mayo meme is true.

Maybe memes are trying to tell us something... but I'm not sure what.

Just spit balling here:

1. Exaggerations can be funny

2. We, as a society, have a general tendency to go with the flow when it comes to trivial overstatements, even if we don't agree with them ourselves (maybe in an effort to "fit in")

3. If you hear the same lie enough times, you might believe it

4. Picking on a particularly popular name brand makes a generalization stick in your mind better

5. Lazy writers rely on cliche to get their points across

Not everyone has an engineer mentality. There’s a reason it’s become a meme, some people get honestly stumped by the instructions. Lack tables are easy and so are chairs. I’ve bought some of their larger and more complicated items and would often stare at the instructions cursing.

From what I've seen, it's only tricky for some people because the instructions are shitty - pictures only, low detail, all the parts and fasteners bundled together instead of pre-sorted, etc. A certain amount of trial and error is to be expected.

And if it was that hard you wouldn't see so many people with so much Ikea furniture out there. :)

The robot was "fed a kind of manual, a set of ordered instructions on how the pieces fit together" - if all it was given was pictures of the real manual, that would be quite cool, but I'd love to see more details here.

The instructions definitely aren't shitty. Pictures-only makes it really simple and the instructions are clear and display exactly which components are required at each step.

Some instructions are pretty confusing. There are places where a more mindful manufacturer would have said "Please remember to only assemble leg 1, 2 and 3, but not 4, because you will have to insert foobar in Step 7 later."

But of course IKEA doesn't want to pay translators to write that sentence in 20+ languages, so pictures only it goes.

They're simplified to the point of minimal cost, not to the point of maximal clarity. Here's how you make it far easier:

Label the pieces by type: A, B, C, etc

Add corresponding annotations to the manual.

Other brands do this. It vastly reduces the amount of time spent "is this the right piece of plywood? Or is it this other one? Which of these two screws?"

Some context through text would help even more in certain places, but you don't even have to go that far to make it a lot easier for people not familiar with matching parts to diagrams.

They do label all the screws and small parts, which are easiest to confuse. It really isn’t necessary for the large pieces.

I put this together last week, https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/40219285/ , and didn't have those labels for that. That's not the hardest one to keep the screws separate, but I've seen worse that I'm pretty sure were tossed all together, too.

What's fun about that nightstand is that you have to really look at the picture in details to figure out which side up and which side forwards for the drawer slider stuff.

My father-in-law and me assembled entire kitchen in a day. It came in 115 boxes and required some custom cutting for the cabinets to make the space for the gas pipe which goes across the wall. So "IKEA is difficult to assemble" idea looks very weird to me.

Ikea instructions are trivial if you can follow them carefully, step by step. If you skip something assuming that you know what to do without looking at each step, you will have bad time.

Also tou need to assemble everything laid out as it's displayed in instructions without any improvisations. It's not the case of "if everything else fails RTFM"

A lot of IKEA stuff has "one way steps" that if you don't get them correct the first time cannot be undone and corrected very easily.

I suspect that most readers here could assemble IKEA furniture based on a picture of the completed item without ever looking at the instructions.

That is probably not true of most people in the general population.

I assemble by just glancing over the pictures, but that's also how I ended up with a bookshelf where the bottom shelf is facing the wrong direction!

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