the disposable culture

Anyone who's ever owned Ikea products know that they're not built to last. Today I picked up an Ikea drinking glass and saw it had lost its shiny clearness and gained a haze around the bottom. The glass is a few months old. I looked at it and thought, figures, that's what happens when you buy inexpensive cheap disposable houseware.

Ikea invented, or at elast perfected the disposable furniture. They are stylish and affordable, plus you get all the fun of assembling the pieces together. Like life-size Lego or jigsaw puzzles. There's genius here, a lot of it in fact. Ingenious Swedish designers have invented mechanisms and parts that go into an overall system so that you can mass-produce parts and map them to any design and then churn out the pieces so the design becomes reality. Connectors, screws, dowels, nails, and particle boards, and voila, furniture for the masses. But stylish so you can also express your individualism.

But of course there are flaws to the system. At the end of the day, Ikea furniture is not made of firm sturdy material. Not the maple, cherry, cedar of yesteryear.