If you want to use one of these architect-designed gardens to grow vegetables in your apartment or office, you'll have to build it yourself because designer Antonio Scarponi has decided he no longer wants to produce a new product.
Instead of producing, distributing and reinventing new things, production and distribution chains without thinking, I believe we should find new ways to assemble what we already have," explains Scarponi.
His designs for six different small gardens are all made from a few pieces that can be found at Ikea, a company Scarponi chose because it is easily accessible in most major cities.
Instead of hacking Ikea furniture, I wanted to hack Ikea as a company, to make an instruction manual for a product that doesn't exist unless you make it yourself. I wanted to make people the producers of an idea," says Scarponi.
Even though Ikea recently had a run-in with some websites that wanted to pirate it, Scarponi's idea was to their liking. When Scarponi produced the design instructions for a campaign, the Swedish company helped with prizes for it.
In his 200-page instruction manual, called Eliooo, Scarponi illustrates construction instructions for everything from a kitchen countertop garden to a desk. Another design mounts on the wall, and another variation has shelves for vegetables on wheels so they can be moved outside or around the room.
If someone doesn't want to buy from Ikea, that's fine too. "The purpose of the design is to inspire. Eliooo is meant to help you play with different models that I suggest in the book, with or without using Ikea components," says Scarponi.
As a designer, he hopes to make more people interested in creating things for themselves. "Design could transform the world's population into the largest creative industry ever known – a crowd-sourced factory," he says.
