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furniture

10 October 2010

#283 Hack furniture

A soft toy, plus a USB stick is a childish adornment to your computer. Photo: Ikea Hacker.

A soft toy, plus a USB stick is a childish adornment to your computer. Photo: Ikea Hacker.

We all live somewhere, be it in a house or on a park bench. We probably spend too much of our lives in the home. In the middle of autumn, it may take some effort to get out of bed at all. Because your life shouldn’t be boring just because you’re at home, we proudly present: Seven things you can do at home.

If a horse and a human mate, their offspring will be a centaur. If a sofa and a rug skip the foreplay and get down and dirty it’s furniture hacktivism. I love the Internet more than I’ve ever loved school. Every day I learn things and discover new phenomena. I remember so clearly how it was back when the Internet was new. The first thing I did was to search for naked pictures of Pamela Anderson. Then I chatted on Aftonbladet's chat under the pseudonym Loverboy83. I was 11 years old and the year was 1994. I quickly learned to make web pages by looking at the source code on other sites.

If a horse and a couch were to mate, it would be chaos. I remember my junior high teachers and how we hacked into their e-mail accounts and read everything they had written. We could easily plant small Trojan horse viruses on their computers so that we could see exactly what they were doing all the time. Got their browsers to always have gay porn open or the FBI's murder image archive as their start-page. That’s retro now. What is new is to use the Internet to make good shit even better. Like furniture hacktivism. You take two pieces of furniture and force them to mate. If a member does not fit saw or cut it off. Pasting and fixing. Not giving a damn about the instruction manual and throwing away the standard tools that the furniture came with. Follow your heart. Hacking art.

Bonus - Hacking Ikea furniture http://ikeahacker.blogspot.com/

Text: Navid Modiri

Required time: 
1 day or less
Cost: 
Over €50.
Cons: 
It could be ugly as hell. But you’ll never succeed without trying.
Pros: 
You get an entirely new piece of furniture that could also be one of a kind because you’ve hacked it yourself.
Taggar: usb stick, retro, ikea, hack, furniture, Aftonbladet chat, 365 things you can do
8 April 2010

#98 Rearrange the furniture

Having a home doesn’t necessarily mean having a home that looks exactly the same the day you’re born until the day you die. Having a home can be much more dynamic than that. What your home looks like is up to you. There is nothing that says that the television set has to be the centre of the apartment or that you even need a sofa in your house. Do what you want and gather inspiration from Moomin books and sci-fi movies alike when organizing your space.

We aren’t couch creatures. We are born in the ocean and what happens in the ocean is that the water puts everything from sand to rocks to drift wood and fish in motion. Everything changes.

My mother didn’t explain or philosophize it this far before she got started. What motivated her was boredom during days off. I could be in bed sleeping and all of a sudden would feel how the ground beneath me moved. Just like that my bed was now on the other side of the room. She was small but strong.

Required time: 
30 minutes to a day.
Cost: 
If you break something in the process there’s obviously the cost of replacing the item, but the rearranging itself doesn’t cost a thing. Invite some friends over for coffee and trick them into helping.
Cons: 
You might get up in the middle of the night to get some water and walk right into a closet, skinning your knee and screaming so loud you wake up your neighbors thus angering them greatly. But that doesn’t have to happen.
Pros: 
You can reach and clean places that were previously unreachable. Visiting friends will see the change and appreciate it. You’ll become happier.
Taggar: variation, rearrange, furniture