Unfolding the IKEA Effect: Why We Love the Things We Build | Hacker News Reader

Unfolding the IKEA Effect: Why We Love the Things We Build

neoacademic.com

33 pointspwg15 comments

There's a flip side to the IKEA effect. I don't have a name for it but it has happened every time I've built something from IKEA.

Basically, it all goes together nicely... except for one defect. Sometimes there's a hole drilled in slightly the wrong location, a hinge is crooked, or there's a small gap between two pieces that should be flush against each other. No one notices. But I do. And it drives me crazy every time I look at those pieces of furniture: I walk into the room and ALL I CAN NOTICE is the tiny DEFECT in the piece of furniture that I built from IKEA.

This may actually be an obsessive compulsive effect.

I don't think it is. To me the frustration stems from having to put in my time and effort into putting a piece of furniture together only to have it turn out not quite as expected because of forces beyond my control such as sloppiness of the drill operator/machinery (holes drilled in wrong place anyone?).

This feeling will be familiar to anyone who has done DIY home improvement work. All you can see in the final product are the minor defects no one else notices. What's interesting is that nearly everyone (anecdotally) experiences this same feeling, but also thinks they're unique in doing so.

The worst thing I find is when you get a part in it which is designed to work with several different products and it has extra holes drilled in it. Rather than specialising the CAM / drilling process, they throw some little stickers in to cover up the holes.

That just stinks.

I have to admit, they seem to have been pretty thorough with their experiment, but I still think the main draw of Ikea isn't that you put it together yourself, but that it's so much cheaper.

I bought some barstools the other day for $20 each. And while technically I assembled them, that isn't why I like them. I like them because I was at a barstool store and the cheapest ones there were $300 each! (Which I was willing to pay, if there were some that I liked enough. There weren't.)

They only thing I can think that they didn't test would be whether or not seeing someone put the item together made a difference. If they just observed, but they didn't help. This would help determine if the draw was in knowing how (and how well) it was constructed, or that they did it themselves.

I agree, Ikea is popular because of the price.

Build-it-yourself and low price for Ikea furniture are related through these aspects: * It turns out assembly does not create nearly as much value as the other steps in the manufacturing process in furniture. I couldn't sell you the chips of wood that went into the MDF of your Ikea dresser for anything near the price of the dresser, though it's a major component. * The cost of assembling furniture on a large scale is greater than the cost of manufacturing the components. Putting pegs into holes using a machine is a hard enough engineering problem (that's one reason behind surface mount electronics), let alone the rest of the assembly. Of course, the way a piece of furniture comes together is different with machine assembly, but there is still cost here. * The volume of flat-packed furniture waiting to be assembled is a small fraction of the assembled volume. This impacts shipping as well as warehousing costs.

Both 'build-it-yourself' and 'low price' are true for Ikea furniture, and due to their correlation, it's easy to pick the wrong one as the cause of success. (Of course, correlation does not imply causation, but as I said at the start of this comment, I think price is causing popularity)

Another relevant example:

Minecraft is a game about placing blocks to build anything you can imagine. At night monsters come out, make sure to build a shelter before that happens. [...] So far 13,823,195 people have registered and 3,563,829 people bought the game.

I noticed this when for the first time when I was playing with small children. Practically the only way to keep them from destroying Origami toys is to involve them in building them and help each to make his own toy. I had the impression it also raised their respect for similar things that others build, but the research suggests otherwise.

I've been working on a cooking app and was concerned about the effect of helping people too much. Great to hear that the example is exactly the problem I'm concerned with, but it didn't prevent the adoption of instant cakes.

I wonder if this applies to software craftsmanship as well.

Do people feel more connected when they build code from source, possibly tweaking the installation path or some other minor variable, vs doing an apt-get, yum, port, or other automated means of software installation?

Or is this a bizarre "I did it the hard way" bit of machismo?

Presumably both the Ikea piece and the origami were built from plans.

The study should look into whether this applies to building one's own designs, or whether that triggers an opposite effect: builder's remorse.

Does anybody have the link to the IKEA hacking info?

There was a site where people used multiple IKEA pieces that were never intended to be used together in new and interesting ways.

You might be looking for http://www.ikeahackers.net/

It seems that people just add value of their work to value of their item and since they value their work much ...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com