What Can Design Engineers Learn from IKEA?What Can Design Engineers Learn from IKEA?

IKEA has become the go-to brand for what are essentially LEGOs for adults -- modular, customizable furniture that's affordable, easy-to-build, and with a name that's impossible to pronounce. There are whole websites devoted to clever tricks to reconfigure IKEA's furniture.

Buried at the core of IKEA is the idea of modular design -- creating products comprised of individual units, or modules, rather than as a whole. When done right, the end result is a product that can be repaired, reused, and re-designed with much less effort.