IKEA is one of the largest furniture chains in the world, and IKEA stores typically showcase their products using many showroom sets that depict an “authentic” home setting through a variety of ways that will be discussed in future posts. IKEA’s signature style of creating the illusion of a perfect home is notable because of its success in creating a convincing simulation of reality, and one that denies its own simulated-ness— what Baudrillard terms a third order simulacrum. It is thus interesting to study, specifically, IKEA Tampines, as a space dedicated to consumption and consumerism, situated as it is within a space originally intended for industrial manufacturing. In this way, we will be analysing IKEA as a space, not only as one of consumption and consumerism, but also as a highly constructed, carefully engineered space of hyperreality.
[The next section, "Breaking the 'Space' Down", contains the blog entries as well as our cultural analyses ]
