Cataloguing our inadequacies

"This year, the IKEA catalogue is alive."

So says a new informational video about the 2013 edition of the Swedish home furnishings bible, a phrase that could sound sinister if it weren't surrounded by wholesome Scandi-modern accessories.

In fact, the new catalogue is offering "augmented reality" -- interactive features that can be scanned by smartphones or tablets, allowing users to snoop inside Best* storage units or change out the duvet covers on a Nordli bed.

That's cool and new, I guess. But in some ways the IKEA catalogue has always offered augmented reality. What else can you call a vision of the modern family home in which four people are shown cheerfully sharing a bathroom during the morning rush? Where wardrobes are full of all-white clothes? Where even the junk drawer is styled?

With its irresistible mix of realism and idealism, the IKEA catalogue has always conjured up a vision that looks kind of like your house, if you were only giving impromptu outdoor dinners for 25, or playing spontaneous ping pong games on the kitchen island, or helping your kids make imaginative felt finger puppets at the dining room table.

The IKEA catalogue debuted in 1951.This year an estimated 211 million copies of the catalogue will be distributed in 43 countries. And of course, this particular edition will be a big thing for Winnipeggers -- a 395,000-square-foot big thing, to be exact. Suddenly, the words, "If you don't find something here that's right for you, you'll find much more... at your IKEA store," can be read with a sense of smug entitlement rather than with bitter resentment about the IKEA-worthiness of Etobicoke and Coquitlam.

As our very own store rises on Sterling Lyon Parkway, I can almost feel the gravitational pull of Billy bookshelves and Storsele rattan chairs. But I also feel some ambivalence. As usual, this year's catalogue makes me feel that I'm inadequately modern, insufficiently styled.

The IKEA catalogue is not just about things, which I could, after all, purchase and make my own. It goes beyond things. In fact, this year's table of contents has given up nouns altogether. (Forget Bedroom, Kitchen, Living Room -- that's so 2011.) More and more, IKEA offers a whole way of living, which is why the 2013 catalogue punches the action words: Sleeping, Eating, Working, Relaxing, even something called Me-ing (which turns out to be a clever way to talk about bathrooms).

You can always check out IKEA's products online, of course, where you find much more specific information about dimensions and materials and cleaning instructions and length of electrical cords. But the catalogue takes these products and forms them into something bigger and better. They become tableaux of hip family life and cool studio apartments and creative work-life balance. Sun-filled, linen-draped, with artfully crumpled pillows and casually piled books, these rooms feel like recognizable but distant dreams of your own life.

And now these tableaux are interactive, making it even more tempting to walk into the 2013 catalogue and just start living there. I'm beginning to understand the guy who stayed at a New Jersey IKEA store for a week as a kind of conceptual comic video project. He slept in a model bedroom, jumped in the kids' ball pit, ate affordable cinnamon buns.

In a few months, we'll be going the other way. Instead of diving into the catalogue, we'll be bringing IKEA back into our homes. Now that's really interactive. Put down the smartphone, and get out the Allen wrench.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 25, 2012 E2