

Unfolding the IKEA Effect: Why We Love the Things We Build - pwg
http://neoacademic.com/2011/09/22/unfolding-the-ikea-effect-why-we-love-the-things-we-build/

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angdis
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.

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marknutter
This may actually be an obsessive compulsive effect.

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marekmroz
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?).

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wccrawford
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.

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neonkiwi
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)

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thristian
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._

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pmr_
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.

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pedalpete
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.

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zdw
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?

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Terretta
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.

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chopsueyar
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.

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ins0mniac
You might be looking for <http://www.ikeahackers.net/>

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scotty79
It seems that people just add value of their work to value of their item and
since they value their work much ...

