Today’s interconnected post-industrial age surrounds the customer with environments shaped by global retail stores which produce desirable and relatively affordable sameness all over the world, making our homes strikingly similar to the in-store interiors. In the following interview, architecture and design historian Rebecca Carrai talks to Taavi Hallimäe about her findings from her PhD research IKEA-Land. A Counter-History of Domestic Space (2023), which she is currently developing into a book.¹ According to Carrai, the relationship between the world’s largest furnishing company IKEA and its customers, designed consciously over a long period of time, has a direct impact on the global domestic interiors we find ourselves in.

Rebecca Carrai: Yes, good question. I should start my answer with what I was doing before I started my PhD. I was interested in the Danish designer and architect Finn Juhl, who despite having built a couple of remarkable domestic buildings, was in Denmark mostly known for his furniture design and completely overlooked in Italy.² I noticed that there was a sort of dichotomy in how he was portrayed and what he did, which, to me, was much more than furniture. In other words, I didn’t see Juhl’s architectural work as disconnected from the work he did as a furniture designer. Actually, he envisioned architecture together with furniture. Another aspect which intrigued me was that he wasn’t only a great designer in terms of aesthetics, but he was also the ambassador of Danish modern design abroad. He was a friend (perhaps more) with Edgar Kaufman Jr., who was the curator of the famous exhibition Good Design at MoMA in New York, which travelled across the US and Canada between the 50s and 60s. In my research, I was looking at this exhibition and the promotion of what was the quintessential image of Scandinavian design and how this was associated with the notions of good design. Finn Juhl was one designer, next Alvar Aalto, Jørn Utzon and other Scandinavians, whose work was exhibited in the Good Design exhibition.

What struck me about how modern design was exported abroad was the role of the interiors, namely how products were staged. Usually, these exhibitions were composed of several rooms and while we have records of this in the MoMA catalogue, the influence of such shows can also be found in the work of scholars both from the design field, like Kerstin Wickman, or business history, like Per Hansen, who was looking at such exhibitions and saying that besides the aesthetic modernizing dimension of the furniture, there was an intrinsic commercial dimension behind the project.³ These were exhibitions that of course wanted to promote Denmark and more broadly Scandinavia and sponsor local goods abroad.

My attention went precisely to the staging of goods. Starting from an interest in how furniture pieces and interiors are staged, I was thinking about where this interest would lead me, where I would go with it. So I started compiling a list of exhibitions of modern interiors around the post-war era – Finn Juhl was born at the beginning of the 20th century, but more than him, I was interested in the aftermath of his work. While compiling the list of these exhibitions, I realized that there was already some material on it, but only a few had really looked at the actor which is so well known for exhibiting furniture pieces and again speaks to this phenomenon of selling an image of Scandinavian design abroad. Through a long route from Finn Juhl to interiors and how interiors can be commercialized and staged, I arrived at IKEA.

RC: I have to add that my research doesn’t explore IKEA everywhere in the world, but tries to analyse patterns and focuses mostly on selected places. I’m interested in understanding the behaviour of large corporations because I believe they are microcosms of their own. Their internal organisation and interactions with the outside world reflect broader societal dynamics and influence how society, in turn, engages with their products. In focusing on selected regions of the world, I chose to focus on, first, the company’s origin country, Sweden, and by extension (and frequent corporate appropriation) other Scandinavian or Nordic countries. We cannot avoid this if we want to know the roots of their infamous “Democratic Design” motto.

The other focus of my research is Italy. And there is also a particular reason for adding Italy which is not only me being Italian and fascinated by this capitalist giant entering my home country, but it is also related to an early interest in promoting a certain design view outside to the world. We could say that already in the 50s and 60s design the two biggest design players in the Global North were Italy and Scandinavia. Both were featured in these famous exhibitions; take, for instance, Italy at Work at the Brooklyn Museum and the simultaneous Good Design exhibition with Finn Juhl and other Scandinavian figures. There was sort of interest in how IKEA entered the Italian market, specifically the clash of the Scandinavian and Italian design myths, how they both created the myth of their own design, how and through which means they perpetuated it. As has been argued recently by Italian design historian Elena Dellapiana, Scandinavian and Italian design histories have tended to merge since the turn of the 20th century; both have been influenced by craft as well as by their respective nation-building processes.⁴ And I think that, actually, there are many more layers behind the national and global or local and foreign identity. It’s not just a matter of collision, but it is really a matter of continuous contamination for market purposes, which originates from ongoing processes of identification through people’s reception.

Let’s pick the Ögla chair, for instance. It is a quite iconic IKEA product, which was designed in the early 1960s. It was produced and probably also designed by IKEA but the founder of IKEA Ingvar Kamprad got it originally from Poland. The product, in turn, was inspired by the Thonet chair. And yet, the reason why I encountered the Ögla chair is that it was one of the most iconic and portrayed items in the Italian advertising campaign that IKEA designed in the late 1980s, in order to prepare its entry into the Italian market, at a time when the Peninsula design myth was fading and the strength of local industrial districts was increasingly under pressure from the liberalising economy. We should note, in fact, that the first Italian store opened in Milan in 1989, coinciding with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of a new geopolitical order, when global market-driven forces would increasingly take the lead. Turning challenges into opportunities, IKEA’s site-specific advertising campaigns had very little focus on the furniture, but they centred on the storytelling of how IKEA shifts the paradigm of how we perceive furnishing and home interiors in Italy. Even if it was facing increased challenges compared to the heydays of the 1960s, local craft was still renowned both in Italy and abroad – especially around the industrial district of Brianza – so the ad campaigns didn’t focus on objects, but deliberately on the hype of IKEA’s arrival and its flatpack concept (innovative in the Italian context), including caricature figures that were portrayed in these campaigns. One of the few items portrayed was Ögla, which was taken up by a stereotypical Italian priest to connect it with the Italian Catholic tradition, so the supposedly Catholic viewer would better identify with the product. Paradoxically, a supposedly Scandinavian product manufactured in Poland was presented as being Italian – or better, what they considered as Italian. For me it is really fascinating how manipulative the marketing stories can be, and how there are so many invisible links and references behind the portrayed marketed object, more than we would at first sight assume.

RC: Consumerism spreads by influencing human psychology, so it seemed almost impossible not to address the behind-the-scenes aspects in my research. I don’t absolutely discard the material object and its physical and ecological condition, but in my work I concentrate more on what lies behind the physical object. Basically, what my project wants to show is that for a long time IKEA has been investing its financial, human, as well as technological capital in not so much shaping the objects, but the capitalist subjectivities. In my analysis of the history of IKEA, I discuss how we shape worldviews through the influence of marketing materials and how that material is architectural in its dealing with space or requiring design tools for its “construction”. I believe the interest in how capitalist subjectivities could be shaped puts IKEA in a kind of pioneering position in terms of the arrival of our cognitive or late or post-industrial capitalist society. Since the very early days of the company and when the local Swedish market exploded after the opening of the first IKEA store in 1958, they immediately organised the production, they immediately outsourced the production, particularly from Poland.

At the same time, this was a turning point for IKEA to understand that they had to hire an increasing number of specialist staff with the skills to shape IKEA consumer subjectivities. At the beginning of the 1960s, they hired pivotal figures, including quite surprisingly, copy editors. Today we know the importance of this for architects, designers, and people in general who want to develop their rhetoric and public image through learning communication or writing to verbally introduce their design concept or to be more convincing and assertive. They already set up the project in the early 1960s when Kampard contacted Brita Lang. She was a freelancer and never became IKEA’s in-house designer, but she provided the boost in the early phase of the catalogue because she realised that despite how the products looked, IKEA wasn’t doing a good job in selling them – the way IKEA was describing the products wasn’t convincing enough. Lang started to test ways in which products could be valorised by even hiding compromising aspects, for example, the poor quality of the materials. Through words she was designing the products. 

These are some of the means and tactics used by IKEA, which in my doctoral research I called objects of mediation. Going back to the discourse of staging interiors, which is also included in the list, we notice the importance of how products create ecosystems with an atmosphere that evokes certain sensations in the viewer. This was also something IKEA started to work on more professionally from the mid-1950s.

RC: Yes, indeed. The case study of IKEA was fascinating for me because it arguably opened up a ‘fourth’ design methodology stream, following design historian Grace Lees-Maffei’s design historiography critique and her Production-Consumption-Mediation paradigm. We could say that the study of IKEA’s relation to space, objects and consumers not only centres on mediation (identified by Lees-Maffei as the last and third stream), but on "prosumption”, thus opening up a potential fourth direction of research.⁵ First coined by Alvin Toffler in 1980, the term “prosumer” indicates a “producing consumer”, someone who produces their own goods and services.⁶ Today this term is used to allude more broadly to a spectrum of practices from customisation to do-it-yourself approaches. In this blurred model of production and consumption, the act of creation shifts from the designer to the consumer, granting non-specialists a sense of agency through direct involvement in shaping the material world. But this model of production is not merely material; it must also be understood in terms of creative, immaterial production.

IKEA has always been smart in interacting with its customers and engaging – or we should say, educating – them with its content. More recently, during the Covid-19 pandemic, people couldn’t go to the store, and therefore IKEA launched Instagram reels, YouTube clips and digital services to encourage people to design their homes by themselves. But perhaps a fascinating, less known, historical anecdote goes back to the catalogue. Initially IKEA was a mail order company, meaning that before 1958 they didn’t have a retail store. After the opening of the first retail store, the catalogue still functioned as a means for the mail order business: people could still order products through the catalogue. In fact, when they opened the store in 1958, it wasn’t the store as we imagine it today; they didn’t have all the products there. So people who wanted to order something, the most secure way would have been through the catalogue. 

The catalogue already functioned as a connector, as a dialogue between the company and the user. In 1955, a couple of years before the first store was opened, one of the first pages of the catalogue engaged the reader-consumer with a set of questions about how you would like your interior to be, how you would position your furniture, according to what features should you prefer one furniture piece over another, what dimensions should it have, etc. And then the reader was given the option to directly draw the ideas on a blank grid (a fundamental device in design and architecture) which was just next to the questionnaire and would have been sent back to IKEA. In a way they gave the users tools: they gave a pencil to non-professionals to not only use their creativity for market purposes, but to also establish a clear dialogue with the customers.

What I am trying to say is that IKEA’s DIY culture extends far beyond the furniture assembly, and starts by triggering the user’s imagination and bringing clients closer to the company. We have archival records of how IKEA clients were engaged and also questions that were posed to the clients as if the client has knowledge of a very technical kind of expertise on designing an interior. Already in the mid-1950s we start with the process which to me speaks about two very timely phenomena. One is data collection because the dialogue, before cookies and other technologies, was aimed at collecting the preferences and taste of the consumer. The other phenomenon is about the deskilling of the designer.⁷ Almost nothing about IKEA’s DIY culture was about the products. It was always about the space which created the products. You need architectural thinking to envision how the design of the room should look and seeking this from a non-expert is quite emblematic even today in our creative societies where everyone engages in creative activities, despite not having any expertise or knowledge in design and architecture.

RC: Yes, IKEA does have an archive, which has been growing since the early days of the company, probably not from 1943 when it was founded, but perhaps a few years later. Everything that was helpful for Kamprad as a record of exchanges (including with customers), and also bills, payments and orders was collected, but design historians are usually also looking for other types of records: images, drawings, prototypes, etc. In the case of IKEA, this kind of archive we don’t yet have.

The IKEA Museum was founded in 2016, and since then they have been actively systematising the materials they already have, but also to understand who could work on them, what kinds of exhibitions could be created based on the materials, etc. Its heritage and corporate history have been, especially since the 1980s, fundamental to growing and capitalising on the company’s profile. The museum got in touch with people who had left the company to ask if they had any materials to share with the museum. They also started to look for things which might have been lost. Now we can talk about an archive of design materials.

My way into the company has been through a former employee, who had been working as the archivist of IKEA, although his work wasn’t completely aligned with what we think an archivist does. But just like any other archivist, he was a gatekeeper who decided what to disclose or what to share with me, but again, not in traditional terms. For example, if we need to visit an archive, we usually have the opportunity to access folders first-hand, this could require us to wear gloves or to take other precautionary measures, but we should be able to see the materials first-hand. Because of the pandemic and the fact that many documents weren’t in one place, but were dispersed and scattered around in boxes, the archivist decided to share a collection of files virtually (including the unpublished Swedish catalogues by then), which in his opinion could be read by an external researcher and could still be relevant to the initial questions that I posed to him.

I did touch the catalogues first-hand but let’s say the first phase of my research relied heavily on those digital documents, and here we are talking about more than three hundred documents because the number of images was already over one hundred. A set of documents was organised per question or focus. But my research also relied on me interviewing him because, first of all, he had been in the company long enough to share pivotal information, but he was also able to connect me with relevant people who either were still working at IKEA or were the company’s former designers, managers, etc.

While working with corporate archives and large organisations can be fascinating, it also presents challenges – researchers face knowledge gaps and must accept lacunae, inconsistencies, and the difficulty of discerning mediated information. In a nutshell, the archive for me consisted of, on the one hand, an archive of information shared meticulously by them, but on the other, also an archive that includes information that questions what was shared with me. Because whenever the information wasn’t almost objective, I had to double check whether it was truth or fiction. Even to researchers they are trying to sell the corporate narratives. So I always compared the material they shared with other materials from IKEA’s critics, scholars from other disciplines, and beyond, including news and journalists’ accounts.

RC: (Laughing.) Well, actually at some point I did, because I moved to Belgium a few months before the pandemic started and when I began working remotely the only company that affordably and swiftly provided aesthetically pleasant home office products was IKEA. Although I was already writing about IKEA I was left with almost no choice, which of course, is not true. I don’t want to adopt any moralistic tones, but rather try to make a systematic critique. Environmental crises shouldn’t be put on individuals alone – this is what neoliberalism does. Systemic infrastructures such as global capitalism and its key forces shouldn’t be fought by us, but with political actors and policies.

I am interested in material culture because I think human beings contribute to defining themselves by approaching and interacting, buying and wearing, consuming and acquiring products of different kinds. This is also related to my potential future project, which is on leather goods and the global architectural infrastructure of luxury fashion – another driving force of the Anthropocene. I am not detached from our materialistic society, but at the same time I did change my consumer habits. I think that being more aware of the processes behind the object is extremely important, especially nowadays when brands are so skilled in manipulating information and lying to the consumer.

Let’s take one of the booklets I examined in my research that was sponsored by IKEA at a very specific moment in 1995, a few years after they opened their first Italian store in Milan in 1989.⁹ This booklet came out on the occasion of the Fuorisalone, the Design Week in Milan, which was also the start of increasing gentrification in the city. We are seeing the aftermath of this. Both the Design Week and later Expo in 2015 are events which led to the current situation of residents in Milan being forced to leave their homes because Milan has become too expensive to live in. So the paradox here lies in the fact that they published the booklet titled Design Democratico (Democratic Design) and they positioned themselves as the democratic saviours, finally bringing low-cost beautiful objects not just to Italians but the world. At the end of the booklet there’s a text by Victor Papanek, a designer and quite a hardcore environmental activist, who even himself was so seduced by the narrative that he waves in favour of the company without any criticism in his epilogue.

We shouldn’t blame users and should speak not only about objecthood, but also about subjecthood, or as I say in my research, about the formation of subjectivity. In this sense, my work was inspired by thinkers like Antonio Gramsci, Pierre Bourdieu and Jason Read more recently, all figures who have looked through identity formation and the most unthinkable ways in which capital operates. The reason why we choose one object rather than another is never caused only by our individuality, but it is a criss-crossing and an intra-process between our individuality, as well as subjectivities and other influences – from class to education – which surround us.

IKEA is definitely a good player in these subjectivity formations. It has managed to create a vision of itself as an anti-capitalist company while driving today’s hyper-capitalist global furnishing market. It has positioned itself as the provider of means for dwelling, while contributing to today’s unliveable global village, where people are constantly on the move and in continuous need of, among other things, new furniture. Whenever we see an IKEA product, besides being seduced by the low price, we are also seduced by how skilfully they mask their capitalist and even post-colonial behaviours. We feel less guilty about our purchases and believe in their so-called democratic thinking. Their rhetoric almost decommodifies their commodifying project. They are good at hiding what sits at the back. The labour behind objects is something they have been working on very hard for a long time, arguably from the 1950s, and for which even early on they hired human capital to work on psychologising consumer behaviour.