Media Matters in the IKEA Home : Catalogues and Choreographies, 1951–2021

In the 1959 edition of its furniture catalogue, the Swedish design company IKEA praised the new medium of television. Television promised to work wonders for the home and its owners. Just three years after the launch of official broadcasts and one year after its commercial breakthrough spurred by Sweden’s hosting of the 1958 FIFA World Cup, television ownership skyrocketed. Television, however, was not simply a new technological device. It was culturally constructed as a natural element in living room design, amounting to a spatial innovation reconfiguring the micro-geography of the home. The vocabulary of rebirth and renaissance used in the IKEA catalogue also underlined a clear and definite break with homes of the past. In the new Swedish home, television was, in the words of Cecelia Tichi, the ‘electronic hearth’ around which the family gathered. More than an added piece of technology, it created a new domestic environment. This chapter is inspired by a material perspective on communication and explores media devices or furniture—home objects that are designed for, or are in themselves, media technologies. It includes everything from bookcases, radio or television cabinets and telephone tables to desks, computer or iPad stands, and mobile phone chargers. Empirically, the chapter investigates the original Swedish editions of the IKEA catalogue from 1951 over a period of seventy years to its final print edition in 2021. All catalogues have been analysed, examining both the visual and textual content as well as the relationship between image and text in the page layout. The aim is to chart the spaces populated by media in the IKEA home and how they changed over this seventy-year period. What are the media life cycles in the choreography of the IKEA home? In what way did media matter?