With its DIY-adjacent industrial model — get the customers to build the stuff — Ikea furniture has long invited tinkering and modifying, as with the excellent Ikea Hackers site. Now the designer Adam Miklosi has created "Uppgradera", a set of 3D-printable designs that add some useful functionality to several well-known Ikea pieces.
"Upgradera", as Miklosi writes on his site, is a Swedish word meaning "upgrade, improve, enhance, customize, update, reform". You can buy his designs for a few bucks on his Etsy store, downloading them as a digital file to 3D print yourself.
This is his whole set …
My personal fave is his desk-lamp shade, pictured at the top of this blog post, of which he notes …
Problem: The NÄVLINGE read lamp is fitted with a high-power LED, but it does not come with a shade. If used as a desk lamp, it keeps shining into one's eyes.
Uppgradera: The NÄ01 is a simple clip-on lamp shade which can be used for work, reading or mood lighting.
He's right! I own a few Ikea lamps in that style — they cost like 37 cents or something, so I buy them essentially by the armful — but they're oddly hard to crane at the right angle so that you a) light your desk without b) also glaring into your eyes. There's something slightly … off about the bezel that refracts the light, such that I keep on doing these incessant and exhausting microadjustments while I'm reading; but since the lamps only cost -12 cents each I keep on using them, instead of buying a better-quality lamp that actually, y'know, works.
Another design that caught my eye is this cupholder for a bed tray, which is clever — apparently cups just sort of slide around too easily, so the snap-in cupholder helps de-slithy-ify the tray …
A few of Miklosi's designs are created to modify Ikea toothbrush holders and cheese graters, but printing something that touches stuff that goes in your mouth is a bit more dodgy, as Hackaday notes …
We worry a little about the safety of the cheese grater and the toothbrush because you will presumably put the cheese and the toothbrush into your mouth. Food safe 3D printing is not trivial. However, the other ones look handy enough, and we know a lot of people feel that PLA is safe enough for things that don't make a lot of contact with food.
Nonetheless, I really dig the whole idea of aftermarket Ikea mods.
