Sara kristoffersson ikea
BySara Kristoffersson. London: Bloomsbury Academic, viii + pp. Illustrations, figures, references, notes, index. Cloth, $ ISBN: | Business History Review | Cambridge Core Home > Journals > Business History Review > Volume 89 Issue 2 > Design by IKEA: A Cultural History. BySara Kristoffersson. English Français.
Design by Ikea - by Sara Kristoffersson (Paperback)
To learn more, view our Privacy Policy. To browse Academia. Kristoffersson argues that the company's commercial success has been founded on a neat alignment of the brand with a particular image of Swedish national identity, and its material expression in a pared-down, functional design aesthetic. Employing slogans such as "Design for everyone" and "Democratic design", IKEA signals a rejection of the stuffy, the "chintzy", and the traditional in both design practices and social structures.
Providing deep and memorable experience to the consumers—in various manners and through all channels possible—is undoubtedly amongst the key factors for success in contemporary markets. Moreover, companies need to consider the trends of gamification, person-alization, eco-living as well as the extremely short life-cycle of their products. In this context, design is getting more and more important in branding and consumer' perceptions about the quality and benefits of the product available.
It serves as a tool of communication not only for what the product is, but how it works and how exactly it will become part of the everyday life of the consumers as well. As such, design, in branding perspectives, has an active role and engages consumers in new kind of relationships that go beyond pure aesthetics. This article is an effort for a socio-semiotic analysis of the set of practices that IKEA implements regarding the use of design as a main basis on which it tries to create, deliver and maintain value of its huge global audience.
What makes the company unique is its multimodal approach in terms of design-based brand management, point-of-sale design, furniture design, entire home interior solutions, catalogue design, and last but not least, lifestyle design. We can easily point out that it has built its own brand meaning by forming a recognizable and self-centered semiosphere, that highly influences the whole category it operates in, and sets the rules in people's self-expression, on the one hand, and their attitude towards the notion of 'home', on the other-home as constantly moving 'immobility' similar to fashion trends and practices.
IKEA is a very good example of design semiotics, applied in marketing activities and real life as successfully mixing its own production with customers' desire for designing their own unique world of objects. Janteloven is a set of unspoken or hidden rules of conformity in Scandinavian societies, especially in Norway and Denmark. These rules, also called as Scandinavian Ten Commandments, were originated from a fiction novel, written in by Aksel Sandemose.
Sandemose gathered, identified and described the unspoken Scandinavian nature of societal and conformity rules that he was highly critical about and stated the obvious with irony. Janteloven is commonly associated with some negative social behavioral traits as if Janteloven put a spell on Scandinavian people. It also was associated with some positive traits, Scandinavian design, IKEA and even Scandinavian social democratic life is associated with it.
This study examines the stylistic characteristics of minimalism, Midth Century Modern style, Scandinavian style, IKEA style and philosophies within their origins, and ideological associations. The study is designed as phenomenology; conceptual discourse analysis and content analysis methods were employed to analyze information. Design and ideology may influence each other reciprocally, and design trends may not be a coincidence.
This study makes connections of how an egalitarian society ends up with minimalist design and IKEA philosophy using social conformity and Janteloven as vehicles. Over time, this expression has been associated with and embedded in a wide range of meanings, forms, images and concepts to gradually morph into a myth: a language of its own. As Beatriz Colomina argues , Bauhaus was never straightforward from the internal perversions, transgressive ideas and pedagogies to the distinct generations, school directors and educational programmes it encompassed.
Design by IKEA: A Cultural History
Both the Bauhaus and IKEA are myths of modernity, responsible for a radical change to our material and immaterial everyday life. But how does their revolution through design differ and intersect? This chapter unpacks the IKEA myth of Democratic Design, which, as the notion of democratic itself suggests, is controversial and, thus, requires closer attention. It investigates how, by tapping into and appropriating a set of Swedish and Central European ideas, the furniture retailer has managed to make these materials in its Democratic Design and to apply them pragmatically to the market.
This dissertation is investigating the curators behind the Design in Scandinavia exhibition that toured the USA and Canada from to , with the intention of uncovering how their personal opinions and agendas shaped the exhibition and in consequence set the stage for Scandinavian Design as we know it. Three case studies explore several angles of this question. Starting with the selection committees, analysing which industries were present and the gender split, arguing that this lead to a higher portion of female designers from Finland, and a particular type of objects chosen for display.
The second case study looks at H. Gummerus and his contribution to how the marketing and general image of Design in Scandinavia was shaped. Highlighting how his skill of creating a marketable brand and an accompanying show impacted the overall look and feel of the exhibition, as well as the selection criteria. The final case study consider the exhibition catalogue by Gotthard Johansson and Tapio Wirkkala, discussing how their contributions complements and contradict each other.
In conclusion the study argues that it is important to realise that personal opinions have made an important contribution to how the notion of Scandinavian Design have been shaped. Realising that it is not an objective truth, but a mythological construct can help Scandinavian designers mine the period for inspiration without feeling constricted. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio, Log in with Facebook Log in with Google.
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