"Democratic Design" for a Class That Is Going Nowhere

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

At 12:59 PM -0500 11/27/02, Doug Henwood wrote:
>Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
>
>>In a word, "free market" espouses the very same ideals that
>>"communism/socialism" did 60-80 years ago.  It is a sad commentary on
>>the state of the left and labor politics today - not only did they loose
>>political power, but the battle for the "hearts and minds" as well.
>
>This is related to the point I was making about Reagan recently - 
>that he projected optimism and possiblity. But everyone said this 
>wasn't true, he was really a prick. He led the right's appropriation 
>of traditionally left discourse about revolution, and rendered labor 
>and the left looking like tired defenders of the status quo. People 
>still don't seem to appreciate how successful this was.
>
>Doug

*****   Slavoj Zizek, "Seize the Day: Lenin's Legacy," _The Guardian_ 
23 July 2002, 
<http://books.guardian.co.uk/lrb/articles/0,6109,761903,00.html>

...John Berger recently wrote about a French advert for an internet 
broker called Selftrade. Under an image of a solid gold hammer and 
sickle studded with diamonds, the caption reads: "And if the stock 
market profited everybody?" The strategy is obvious: today, the stock 
market fulfils the egalitarian communist agenda - everybody can 
participate in it. Berger proposes a comparison: "Imagine a 
communications campaign today using an image of a swastika cast in 
solid gold and embedded with diamonds! It would, of course, not work. 
Why? The swastika addressed potential victors, not the defeated. It 
invoked domination not justice." In contrast, the hammer and sickle 
invokes the hope that "history would eventually be on the side of 
those struggling for fraternal justice". At the very moment this hope 
is proclaimed dead according to the hegemonic ideology of the "end of 
ideologies", a paradigmatic post-industrial enterprise (is there 
anything more post-industrial than dealing in stocks on the 
internet?) mobilises it once more. The hope continues to haunt us. 
*****

*****   New York Times 1 December 2002
How the Disposable Sofa Conquered America
By JOHN LELAND

Sitting in a modern, uncluttered office in Almhult, Sweden, earlier 
this year, a woman named Josephine Rydberg-Dumont advanced a global 
theory of home. ''We're ready for modernism now,'' she said. ''When 
it first came, it was for the few. Now it is for the many....'' 
Rydberg-Dumont, 47, is the managing director of Ikea of Sweden, the 
creative nexus for what has grown to a $10.8 billion worldwide 
operation....She was heading toward a vision of material utopia in 
which products are the problem and more products are the 
solution....Last year, 29.3 million people worked their way through 
the directed Habitrail of an American Ikea store. In the slog of 
recession, Ikea sales for the year that ended in August were up 5 
percent over the previous year....

The train ride to Almhult from Copenhagen, the nearest major city, 
passes through an unattractive grind of rocky forests, broken 
incongruously by a tiny Wild West theme park called Amerika. The 
theme park, gone in the span of a train whistle, is a small gesture 
in the way of cultural translation and tribute, like the American 
programs that cycle through Swedish TV.

America is here and not here. In the 19th century, much of the 
region's population immigrated to places like Minnesota and Nebraska, 
leaving those who stayed behind to squeeze a slender living from 
crafts and small farming. In 1953, Ingvar Kamprad opened a furniture 
showroom here. He combined his initials with those of Elmtaryd, the 
farm where he grew up, and the village of Agunnaryd, his hometown, to 
form the name Ikea. Today, the United States -- with its shifting 
economies, its eager trendiness and its unique demographics -- may 
control a good deal of the future fortunes of Kamprad's company. It's 
certain that his company has anticipated a good deal of the future of 
the United States.

To peer into the world of Ikea for any time is to dive into the 
thorny bramble of class, in particular the twisted course of class 
during the 1990's. In the peculiar rites of the company culture, from 
Almhult outward, class is always in the foreground. The company's 
70,000 employees are called ''co-workers''; the target customers are 
referred to as ''the many,'' or sometimes ''people with thin 
wallets.'' Private offices are rare; everyone is on a first-name 
basis. Bill Agee, an American who transferred to Almhult five years 
ago, said he had to adjust upon entry. ''It's a little religious or 
missionary in a sense,'' he said, ''but it's who we are.'' The overt 
goodyism of it meshed with his experiences of Sweden as a whole. When 
he first arrived, he made a wrong turn down a one-way street. Instead 
of screaming at him, people on the street wagged fingers -- ''as if 
to say, 'You're not doing your part to support a better Sweden,''' he 
said. ''That bothered me more than someone giving me the finger.''

The office chatter has a benevolent ''Star Trek'' vibe: the answer is 
always design, and the reward for such answers is world domination. 
The most basic products come packaged as a mission, rendered under 
the slogan ''democratic design.'' Even the company's newsletter 
includes articles on the effectiveness of the newsletter: a recent 
issue cited a study showing that ''three out of four Ikea co-workers 
read the magazine regularly.'' Peter Fiell, who researched the 
company for his book ''Industrial Design A-Z,'' described the ethos 
as a kind of moral humanism played out in chairs and shelving units. 
''It goes back to Charles Eames -- how to get the most quality to the 
greatest number of people for the least money,'' Fiell said. ''That's 
the nucleus of modernism. It's inherently optimistic.''...

Among the many repercussions of the technology boom of the 1990's was 
that it flipped the compass points of American class. Suddenly new 
money was more dynamic, more mesmerizing than old 
money....Appropriate to the new economy, the furnishings were 
expensive, but their value lay not in the materials but in an overlay 
of information, a narrative of design. They told a story that 
flattered both the owner and his audience. It was retro and futurist, 
a comforting view of dizzying change. For Ikea, this was a recipe for 
opportunity. Marble was expensive; color could be done cheap.

Josephine Rydberg-Dumont noticed a corollary change that had similar 
advantages for Ikea's American experiment: an upmarketing of 
downmarket goods. Calvin Klein's cK T-shirts, Starbucks coffee, 
basketball shoes designed as if for the space program, sushi in the 
Grand Union -- these were tokens of conspicuous quality for a broad 
part of the population. ''Ten or 15 years ago, traveling in the 
United States, you couldn't eat well,'' she said. ''You couldn't get 
good coffee. Now you can get good bread in the supermarket, and 
people think that's normal. I like that very much. That's more 
important to the good life than the availability of expensive wines. 
That's what Ikea is about.''

It was a particularly good thing to be about in the 1990's, a decade 
in which the economic folk tales were of astronomical success (or, by 
the end, vertiginous falls), but the broad reality was quite 
different: for Americans in the middle of the wage scale, real 
earnings, adjusted for inflation, declined or held flat for much of 
the decade. Even when they were putting away a few dollars, members 
of the middle class were losing ground to the people to whose status 
they aspired, the heroes of those folk tales. The majority of 
Americans were participants in a zeitgeist of obscene riches without 
having a piece of the action.

What they could have, in just the same degree as the new economy's 
new rich, was the immaterial titillations of design. Design was a 
perfect class commodity for a class that was going nowhere. It added 
value to a toilet brush or a garbage pail, to say nothing of personal 
computers. The ubiquity of these fluid computer-generated designs 
suggested an attractive world of class mobility. It promised that you 
could be moving forward, even if your paycheck was slipping back: 
why, just look at your toothbrush, designed by Philippe Starck for 
Alessi. Glossy design magazines sat side by side with the tabloids in 
supermarket checkout lines. Decor gurus built cable TV franchises 
among the same daytime audiences that used to watch soap operas. 
Target invited the six-pack public into the (blob-shaped) pool, 
introducing conspicuously cool lines by the name-brand designers 
Starck and Michael Graves. Here was a distinctly American perspective 
on democratic design: if you couldn't afford to make your home look 
like Buckingham Palace, you could get some of the snob appeal of an 
Ian Schrager boutique hotel. Not only that, the newer take was better.

And what that new perspective looked like, more than anything, was 
Ikea. Showcased in magazines, bruited among early adopters, Ikea 
suited the benign technocracy and ironic wink of the new economy. 
Where stores like Pottery Barn and Restoration Hardware offer the 
comfort of prefab antiques, with a promise of permanence and 
connection with the past, Ikea fabricates a connection with motion 
itself. With little change in the product line, the company shifted 
its profile from its blandly functional side to its design side -- if 
not among the literal ''many,'' then among the taste makers the many 
followed. ''They raised the popular consciousness of design,'' Fiell 
said. ''It's based on a highly optimistic view of the future, with 
equality of opportunity and an integrated look that is part of the 
identity.'' Sold only in Ikea stores, surrounded by a universe of 
other Ikea goods, the designs aim for an instant sugar rush. Like the 
Swedish clothing chain H.&M., whose store opening clogged Manhattan 
sidewalks in April 2000, it promises 360 degrees of immediate visual 
candy, at impulsive, no-guilt prices -- what the critic George W.S. 
Trow has called the context of no context. It's like being on TV, all 
shimmery surface. As a set designer for MTV's ''Real World'' told me, 
''We love Ikea.''

The aroma of impermanence that hung over a lot of Ikea products, the 
nicked veneers and wobbly joints of Ikea regret, no longer seemed 
such a problem. Impermanence had become a mark of progress, not of 
decay. After years in the red, Ikea's revenues in the United States 
doubled over a four-year period, to $1.27 billion in 2001 from $600 
million in 1997. The company expanded from 5 stores in the United 
States at the start of the 90's to 15 stores now and plans to add 50 
more in North America by 2013. The United States is the company's 
third-biggest market, after Germany and Britain. The company declines 
to give information about profits, but as an indication of the number 
of people visiting these stores, the in-house restaurants, serving 
Swedish meatballs and cured salmon, are now the 15th-largest food 
chain in America.

And though it was linked to the boom, the benign futurism has so far 
proved resistant to recession. ''Our philosophy should work in good 
times and bad times,'' said Lena Simonsson-Berge, marketing manager 
for Ikea North America. There would be no need to retune the Ikea 
pitch, she added. ''We are prepared for downturns.''

There is a price for all of Ikea's cost-cutting, and during my 
immersion in Almhult I felt the increasing chafe of design 
irritation. Little flaws, multiplied, mocked the cheery optimism of 
the veneers. Even in the company headquarters, cabinet doors never 
seemed to line up at right angles; in a conference room organized 
around four abutting beech Effektiv desks, each corner was a slightly 
different height. Joints wobbled. ''See, this is what I don't like,'' 
said Eric Linander, a communications officer, jiggling an unsteady 
table top. ''The design is good, but the quality is not so good.'' 
The minor glitches undercut the promise of material utopia: things 
weren't getting perfect; they were creaking from below. Like many 
logistic systems that are internally consistent, Ikea's populism does 
not accommodate the inherently individualistic revenge of 
imperfection: that delivering 80 percent of the quality for 60 
percent of the price is not always a bargain. What looks good on 
''Real World'' does not always wear well at home. Linander casually 
dropped a word to the wise: self-assembled furniture requires 
retightening over time.

The test of the limits of Ikea living lies in a pilot program called 
BoKlok, Swedish for ''Smart Living,'' that the company has instituted 
at scattered sites in Scandinavia. (See ''A Prefab Utopia,'' this 
page [@ <http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/01/magazine/01UTOPIA.html>].) 
For nearly six years, in partnership with the international developer 
Skanska, the company has built small, prefab apartment buildings, 
expanding its design agenda beyond chairs and light fixtures to cover 
whole mini-communities and, by extension, the lives inside. So far, 
they have built more than 1,000 units and have branched into four 
countries. The inexpensive, pleasant apartments carry the overlay of 
''democratic design'' to a logical conclusion. Madeleine Nobs, one of 
the three architects, all women, described the project in evangelical 
terms: ''As an architect, I think you can make people's lives better 
by design.''

For all of Ikea's rhetoric about social mission, however, there is an 
unspoken paradox to the company's efforts to build homey communities. 
With its huge parking lot and accompanying traffic glut, an Ikea 
store is often a smiley-faced enemy of community cohesion. The low 
prices draw customers away from smaller neighborhood shops, the nodes 
of community exchange; the volume of business attracts other mass 
retailers, creating big-box strip malls. Wary residents in 
Westchester County, N.Y., recently organized to fight Ikea in court, 
ultimately preventing the company from opening a store in New 
Rochelle. In the same way, Ikea's self-image as an ecofriendly 
company stands in direct contradiction to its campaigns telling you 
to toss out a perfectly good lamp.

But the company has an impressive track record for avoiding 
controversy and keeping its positive, even benevolent, image intact. 
Ikea was mentioned in a 1992 documentary that looked at child labor 
in Pakistan but managed to escape the damaging publicity lobbed at 
Nike and other multinationals, in part by forming strategic 
partnerships with groups like Greenpeace, Unicef and Save the 
Children. In 1998, when it was struggling with its environmental 
policy, Ikea reached out to Greenpeace and bankrolled a major 
research project by the World Resources Institute that impressed all 
involved parties. Most striking, in 1994, Ingvar Kamprad, the 
company's founder, was revealed to have supported various Nazi groups 
in the 1940's and 50's. He issued an apology, and in April 2001 the 
company expanded into Israel without incident. On opening day, 15,000 
customers flooded the aisles.

On a recent afternoon, I muscled my way through the Ikea store in 
Elizabeth, N.J., which frequently tops $1 million in sales on a 
Saturday. Like all Ikea stores, it is set up to force shoppers 
through the whole store, instead of letting them head for their 
department of choice: a bit of gentle social coercion, the strong arm 
of democratic design. Three times each year, department heads follow 
customers through the maze, mapping their paces to see how to get the 
most from the traffic flow. When they noticed that men weren't 
following their female partners into the textile departments, they 
set up displays of tools just outside. ''We sold screwdrivers like 
you can't believe,'' Nordin said....

<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/01/magazine/01IKEA.html>   *****

Cf. _Fight Club_, <http://www.fightclub.co.uk/>

Cf. Louis Proyect, "Frank Lloyd Wright," 
<http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/culture/wright.htm>.
-- 
Yoshie

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