Sunday 18 August 2013

Ikea Experience 1; Great Instruction

I have had opportunity to build quite a lot of furniture from Ikea the other day.

There are two things I have noticed by the experience of building few of their furniture.

1, Their instructions do not contain words. They simply guide us how to build the furniture by drawings and illustrations, and the numbers.




I found this Ikea instructions extremely interesting, as most of the instructions and textbooks are based on words. Then, I wondered WHY? There are few possibilities I can think of;
1, The company is so international and if they use all different languages to explain how to build the furniture, instructions will become so big and thick.
2, Pictures and illustrations explains pretty well how to build the furniture; no needs of using words and they functions well.
It made think that, maybe this is one of the reasons why demonstrations are more effective when I teach ballet class?

2, More I built their furniture, faster I got to built new ones; I have found that there are patterns how to build Ikea furniture. So, by the time I was making the last furniture, I could guess what goes where and how to assemble them just by looking at the parts.

This fact was also very interesting to me, as by the time I was building the last furniture, my arms and body moved automatically; as I read the instruction, my arms were already looking the right screws and tools to build the each section.
At the begginig of the building process was;
1, Read the instruction
2, Find the right parts and tolls for the section
3,Think about it ( well, it is pretty straight forward so do not need much of time to think, just checking to make sure parts were correct and check what goes where )
4, Assemble

However, by the time I have built few, my process became
1, Find the right parts and most suitable tools for the section ( suggested tools do not mean they are most suitable tool for me to complete the section most successfully ) as I am reading the instruction simultaneously.
2, Assemble

By building fair amount of Ikea furniture, I have leaned their patterns.
Therefore, my process got faster as I have physically experienced and understood about their furniture. By deepening the understanding towards their furniture, I started to do only and exactly what I need to do to build them; started to illuminate the unnecessarily process.

Win Wengar and Richard Poe explains these learning process by using Hebbian theory in their book " The Einstein Factor". My process is a good example of building the Hebbian connection in my brain. They explain that the process of repeating actions makes Hebbian connection stronger.

Let us assume that the persistence or repetition of a reverberatory activity (or "trace") tends to induce lasting cellular changes that add to its stability

Hebb.D.O. Explains in his book The Organisation of Behavior.

The learning process of aim is to filter the experience, then decide what to illuminate as the unnecessary action in life, to make more pure and clearer. Not adding more things. Completely opposite of that.



No comments:

Post a Comment