archive.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