2017.01.04. How Ikea's New Joinery is Advancing Their Design
Let's get into table design for a second. If you look at your average dining table, you'll see most have aprons. The aprons prevent wracking and, in the case of solid wood tops, help prevent the tops from warping.
Look underneath the average dining table and you'll see the aprons are often connected to some type of corner braces. These are to keep them square and provide a solid connection with the legs.
Aprons and braces, necessary though they may be, require more raw material, are extra things for a manufacturer to ship and extra things for a consumer to assemble, not to mention pay for. So Ikea has done away with both aprons and braces with their Lisabo line.
Here's how they did this. Remember the funky wedge dowels Ikea's prototype engineers came up with a couple of years ago?
Ikea designers Knut and Marianne Hagberg took the wedge dowel concept and applied it to the legs of the Lisabo series of tables and desks.
By CNC-milling striations into the top of the leg, and a corresponding shape into the underside of the tabletop at the four corners, the Hagbergs created a leg that simply slides into place and locks in with a single screw holding a wedge.
This wedged, striated joint provides enough registered contact area to preclude wracking, meaning aprons aren't required. Since there's no need for aprons, there's no need for corner braces. And the consumer can pop the legs in quickly, which is a boon not only the first time they do it, but anytime they move.
And the table's pretty easy on the eyes, too. The Hagbergs used the old design trick of chamfering the underside; since the tabletop's got to be thick enough to accommodate the joint, chamfering the edges provides the illusion of thinness to the top, making the table look airy.
Anyways, this is just an example of how prototype engineers seeking a faster joint connector ended up influencing and advancing the design, both aesthetically and from a UX perspective, of a dining table.