#276 2019 · IKEA Israel (with Milbat and Access Israel) · Retail / furniturereframe
IKEA made its furniture accessible without redesigning a single product
the problem
Making an entire product catalog accessible to people with disabilities looks like it requires redesigning or re-engineering every product, which is slow, expensive, and blocks accessibility until the redesign ships
background
Furniture designed for an able-bodied user is often unusable for someone with limited grip strength, reach, or mobility — a cabinet door with a small flush handle, a low sofa with no way to rise from it, a light switch requiring fine motor control. The standard corporate response to that gap is a redesign roadmap: re-engineer the product line, over years, to be accessible from the factory floor, which means the millions of units already in customers' homes stay inaccessible in the meantime, and any given fix is trapped behind the company's own manufacturing and retail cycle.
IKEA Israel, working with the disability organizations Milbat and Access Israel, started from a hackathon that put engineers and people with disabilities in a room together at an IKEA store, working directly against existing, already-purchased furniture rather than a future product line. The output was not a redesigned catalog but a set of small, separate attachments — oversized handles, couch-leg risers, curtain grippers — that snap onto the exact products already sitting in customers' homes.
the move
Rather than manufacturing and shipping the add-ons as a physical retail product, IKEA released 13 of them as free, downloadable 3D-print files that any customer with access to a 3D printer — or a local maker space, library, or accessibility organization with one — could print and install themselves, immediately, on furniture they already owned, without waiting for a redesigned product to reach a store shelf.
the payoff
The files were downloaded and printed in 127 countries, and IKEA Israel reported a 37% sales lift on the specific 'adapted' products the add-ons targeted, alongside a Cannes Lions Grand Prix in Health & Wellness; the project also entered the Design Museum's Beazley Designs of the Year list the same year.
what came after
ThisAbles is a standard case study in design, marketing and accessibility literature for solving an accessibility gap through low-cost distributed manufacturing (3D-print files) rather than centralized product redesign, and is frequently cited alongside IKEA's other inclusive-design initiatives as evidence that accessibility fixes don't require rebuilding a product line from scratch.
filed under
references
- [1]Dezeen — IKEA's ThisAbles add-ons adjust furniture for people with disabilitiesDezeen, 2019dezeen.com
- [2]Contagious — Ikea, ThisAblesContagious, 2019contagious.com