IKEA

It's been an interesting week. We are completing a few renovations on our Texas house and have so made a few trips to our favorite local Swedish furniture store.

I'm having quite a sense of deja vu, because I've spent today with my toolkit, assembling various pieces of furniture and crossing off household projects from my to-do list. It's very much like being out on Aspö.

I also read an interesting article on how IKEA accomplishes all those aspirational photos in their yearly catalog. They have an enormous studio filled with experts to recreate the stylish Swedish lifestyle.

Increasingly, however, those images aren't photographs, but computer simulations. Instead of an army of tradesmen, youngsters at their computers take the contents of the IKEA catalog and recreate the perfect kitchen digitally.

I'm not sure what to make of that; after all, many of the movies and TV shows we watch nowadays are created digitally. But an IKEA kitchen is much more a real thing than the forest moon of Endor, and I would expect that it would exist somewhere, even if it is just in a studio for a photographer's lens. But maybe that's just me being an old fogey!