Joe Lamantia.com

I used to think of each IKEA prod­uct I brought home as a sort of for­eign house guest. They came from a far away coun­try. Each was dif­fer­ent than the oth­ers in size, shape, and appear­ance. And all had names I didn’t under­stand and couldn’t asso­ciate with any­thing famil­iar. Some of these guests left soon after they arrived. But many — the ones that fit in well with the rest of the house­hold — stayed longer. These joined the group I call “my new Swedish friends”.
A name should carry some depth of mean­ing; it should tell you about the friend it iden­ti­fies. But my new Swedish friends had mys­te­ri­ous names that told me lit­tle about them. To make up for this dis­con­cert­ing lack of con­text, I cre­ated my own sto­ries and mean­ings to enrich their quirky names. Imag­in­ing the story behind the name of each new arrival became part of the rit­ual of wel­com­ing them into the home.
Cast of Char­ac­ters
Here are the mean­ings I imag­ined for the names of sev­eral of my new Swedish friends:

Lek­man

A comic-book vil­lain in the Swedish ver­sion of Superman

Grund­tal

Orig­i­nal name of the mon­ster in Beowolf

Kvar­tal

How you feel after drink­ing too much and tak­ing a taxi home over a bumpy road.

Anno

The mas­cot of the Swedish National Park sys­tem. Wears a pointy gnome hat.

Noen

Break­fast bread typ­i­cally served with pre­served fruit spreads; pop­u­lar with retired Uncles.

Aspud­den

An unpleas­ant med­ical con­di­tion treated with pun­gent ointments

Kvad­rant

Qual­ity con­trol instru­ment for steam-engines used by boiler makers

Expe­dit

Replaces “Schnell!” when Das Boot is dubbed into Swedish

Stol­men

Botany term iden­ti­fy­ing a plant part that the Vic­to­ri­ans illus­trated in com­pre­hen­sive hor­ti­cul­tural guides, but per­mit­ted only mar­ried sci­en­tists above the age of 45 to view while under direct super­vi­sion from tech­ni­cal librarians

Vari­era

The weather in Stock­holm dur­ing early spring

Rationell

An under­ground art-film col­lec­tive active dur­ing the height of the Swedish Beat Move­ment, in the late 50’s.

Stave

Noto­ri­ous indus­tri­al­ist and brief­case man­u­fac­turer in the Pre­war era

Kludd

A folk-music instru­ment played by min­strels in the Mid­dle Ages

Komers

Last name of a famous avi­a­tor: Tom Sel­l­eck met this man with while prep­ping to film “High Road To China”. Like many Swedes, Komers was tac­i­turn; how­ever, this does not account for Selleck’s ter­ri­ble performance.

Snitta

Slang for bitchy

Ord­ning

Stan­dard name for the Audit­ing depart­ment in large companies

Assign­ing a story or mean­ing to each name became an antic­i­pated, nec­es­sary step in the cycle of choos­ing, buy­ing, installing / assem­bling, using, and then accept­ing each IKEA prod­uct. Whether humor­ous, whim­si­cal, or sim­ply ran­dom, cre­at­ing con­text for the prod­ucts made them ordi­nary and famil­iar.
Con­text Is King
In terms of cus­tomer expe­ri­ences and con­sumer prac­tices, this behav­ior is re-contextualizing prod­ucts with an exist­ing con­text, one that for some rea­son is not suf­fi­cient or accept­able. For each prod­uct, I cre­ated a web of cul­tural asso­ci­a­tions — albeit fic­tion­al­ized ones — to replace the expected but miss­ing net­work of con­nec­tions I’ve come to expect and rely on to make judge­ments about the things I incor­po­rate into my life.
Why does the miss­ing con­text for sim­ple house­hold items mat­ter? Part of my habit comes from the fact that I enjoy mak­ing up sto­ries and spec­u­lat­ing about the prove­nance of all sorts of things: it’s part of explain­ing the world as I find it. Craft­ing sto­ries for their ori­gins also off­sets the frus­tra­tions of being a con­sumer left to man­age every­day house­hold needs with strangely incom­plete items, like shelves sold with­out mount­ing screws, or cur­tain rods not pack­aged with hang­ing hooks. Know­ing something’s ori­gin — even if I’d just made it up out of whole cloth ten min­utes ago — gave me a mod­est pos­i­tive feel­ing of surity and con­fi­dence when con­fronted with the unknown.
Sto­ries About Rome Not Being Built In a Day Were Not Built In a Day: Or, The Effect of Inten­sity On Cul­tural Fab­rics
The IKEA brand evokes a strong set of val­ues and an out­look on lifestyle deci­sions that is well known and eas­ily rec­og­nized. Those val­ues and the implied out­look suc­cess­fully trans­fer to the indi­vid­ual prod­ucts sold by IKEA. Thanks to the umbrella of the IKEA brand, the lack of con­text for my new Swedish friends wasn’t trou­bling. As long as we were intro­duced one at a time.
But ersatz cul­ture is not as durable and sat­is­fy­ing as the real thing, as the cre­ators of fan­tas­tic con­structs of all types know well [MMOG, Yugoslavia, Iraq]. While mov­ing and fit­ting out a new liv­ing space with home office fur­ni­ture, kitchen acces­sories and many other inven­tive and afford­able , I met *many* new Swedish friends *all at once*. Bring­ing so many IKEA prod­ucts home empha­sized their strange­ness in a chal­leng­ing way. In response, I made up quite a few new sto­ries in rapid suc­ces­sion, to knit them into the fab­ric of the famil­iar.
Still, I was trou­bled because I was aware of hav­ing to make up so many sto­ries at the same time. And since I’d just moved, the larger envi­ron­ment that had to incor­po­rate so much new­ness in a con­cen­trated dose was itself in flux. End result: the influx of the cumu­la­tive strange­ness of names, the sub­sti­tu­tion of arti­fi­cial con­text for real, and the inten­sity of new­ness on sev­eral lev­els out­weighed the strength of the con­tex­tual asso­ci­a­tions my new friends retained from IKEA’s brand.
To be con­tin­ued in Part 2