If there’s one concept that conjures up precise, powerful, and seemingly immutable images, it’s Nordic design. Yet that immutability is only an illusion: behind its minimalist shell, Nordic design is threaded with irony, experimentation, and the occasional derailment, all of which lead to flashes of insight, sometimes even to innovation.
Take an iconic brand like Ikea. It’s an icon thanks to core values like minimalism, democratic design, and versatility. But there’s never a moment without stories emerging that break the stereotype and suggest ways to look beyond the surface of that pale-toned-wood world.
We had the opportunity to dive into this very world in conversation with David Wahl, Ikea designer, already known for creating a lamp that evoked nothing less than Star Wars’ Death Star, and now back with another piece – Ödleblad – that tells this entire “behind-the-surface” story. It’s a suspended lattice sphere, born from a puzzle of 60 small L-shaped birch veneer elements — the form of 60 miniature Allen keys, the very foundation of Ikea’s assemblable universe.
Wahl, a trained product designer – he studied at Beckmans College of Design in Stockholm, a true Ikea talent incubator — describes the project first and foremost as a challenge he set for himself. It began with the idea of creating something big from small parts, minimizing waste, and staying true to the principle of compact packaging. But soon, the process details reveal a broader picture.
“It's quite fun that you take something from Ikea heritage, like the shape of an Allen key, and use it as a piece of a whole lamp” Wahl told Domus. “Especially because that shape turned out to be quite useful in the production: in production, they form almost no waste when you're punching them, as they kind of go as a puzzle into each other. (The same goes for) the semantics of how you put the lamp together: in one end of the allen key, and it goes into the round slot. Then another triangular shape, that goes into the triangular slots”. Not all 60 pieces need to be assembled by hand, as was originally planned – five groups are pre-assembled and only need to be joined together. It’s the result of a gradual refinement process, one that led to choosing birch veneer, reinforced with ABS: when the light is off, it conveys the solidity of wood; when on, it reveals an almost abstract transparency.
It's quite fun that you take something from Ikea heritage, like the shape of an Allen key, and use it as a piece of a whole lamp.
David Wahl
There’s the iconic object — the softly glowing Scandinavian globe — but it’s made of Allen keys; there’s the engineering, but it begins as a puzzle. Maybe, beyond the minimal, Nordic design also has something ironic, even playful, to offer?
“I like the playfulness to integrate as part of the design,” says Wahl. “At Ikea, alongside that Scandinavian minimalism of ‘do more with less’, we try to make our design playful, but not like in-your-face, playful; (it’s about) using certain elements that kind of elevate the young-at-mind, spirits: things that make you happy don't need to be super serious all the time.
And they don’t have to belong solely to the world of furniture, Wahl continues: “I like to find inspiration from fields that are ‘other’ to design – from sports gear, movies, games, the automotive industry. I think that is more interesting than looking at furniture design, so that you can bridge from other elements”.
Building an identity, he adds, is broader than simply carrying on a legacy or staying vertically within a field. “Most of the time, it (all) starts from a problem statement”.
If one of Wahl’s main concerns is translating sustainability into both processes and products, his approach seeks sustainability through design intuition more than through purely technical solutions.“Of course, one part of the journey is only technical; like moving the material agenda, for example. But as a designer, there are a lot of things you can do as well” he said.
Take a generic desk, for example: “You can be smarter about how you use the desk space, or new ways of storing things, rather than having a large shelf above the desk, which then can reduce the usage of material. If you're already thinking about these construction features at an early stage, it’s easier to implement them also at the later stage.”
I like the playfulness to integrate as part of the design. At Ikea, alongside that Scandinavian minimalism of ‘do more with less’, we try to make our design playful, but not like in-your-face.
David Wahl
That’s also the essence of Ikea’s ‘democratic design’ principle – a five-point test (form, function, quality, sustainability, low price) applied to every product – and the same criteria shaped Ödleblad. The form came first, but refining its quality-to-price ratio brought in the choice of wood and its careful optimization.
On that note, Wahl also developed the lamp using a parametric 3D model, and digital finite-element testing is now standard for all products, but the complexity of the connections meant that building and testing physical models was what ultimately led to the final result.
A flexibility that’s the exact opposite of the idea of an icon, of those immutable images we might associate with Nordic design when we see it as cliché. Instead, it’s a quality that belongs entirely to the discourse of contemporary, global design.