From Designing Systems to Designing Kitchens

Ever realise the similarities of designing systems and designing kitchens? Well, if you are like me and bought a kitchen from IKEA, you can appreciate the satisfaction on seeing a piece of item be transformed into a functional "system" - a kitchen!

Indeed, the picture here is a snapshot of a half completed kitchen I am building at my new house. This design was a version 3 - and I am sure it has its flaws too eventually, but currently I am in love with just a few pieces of wood placed together!

It all started when I first tried to engage a contractor to do the kitchen. He came, did some measures, showed me some pictures and kind of sketched out roughly what it should look like. Before he came, I had already drawn out some samples of how I think it should look from my research from IKEA. A week later, he reverted, and drew out on a piece of paper with the quotation. The fact was that, he drew with a pen and gave me the original!

After two more weeks, only he tried to contact me again and asked me when I wanted to start. During those two weeks I had already despatched my "temporary project family AKA family member who remains undisclosed" to IKEA to do further designs.

IKEA has a really cool kitchen design system. They could draw the exact design and model it in two and three dimensions and best of all, they could generate a BOM and quotation for you from this drawing. The only problem seems to be that they don't do this online, otherwise I am sure they will have more business!

So, back to my contractor, and I was photocopying his original and drawing my revisions on it as though I was reviewing my co-worker's proposal document! And then my colleague casually asked me, why am I doing that, if he is a designer, he should earn his money. That just about sealed the guy's fate, I took a day to refine the design and brainstorm it around, and by version three of IKEA design, I could even be pro enough to choose the wood.

Wait for my housewarming lunch ya? (Rest assured, only the microwave oven will be used to heat up the ta-pow KFC :-) haha)