DFA

Years ago, I helped my flatmate and good friend by proof-reading his bachelor’s thesis about Design for Assembly, or DFA. DFA is exactly what it sounds like: a philosophy of designing a product in such a fashion that is as easy as possible to assemble.

This was years ago, but I still remember some core principles. One was to make the final waiting-for-assembly product consist of as few pieces as possible. The components should also be fully symmetrical, or – failing that – nonsymmetrical in an exaggerated fashion. That way, it’d be either impossible to put a piece upside down, or it wouldn’t matter.

And why am I telling you this?

Because, last weekend I bought a wardrobe that violated each and every known DFA principle, and probably some of the unknown ones too.

Now, we all have seen and heard people complain about IKEA furniture. But trust me, IKEA’s got nothing on this. Putting their funnily-named items together may take a while, yes. But the process is still quite simple, and the instructions are more or less clear.

Which was not the case with this latest paindrobe of mine.

It came in four cardboard boxes, numbered 1 to 4. They might as well been unnumbered, though, since there was no order to them whatsoever. For example, the small cupboards that the assembly manual recommended to put together first, had their pieces in boxes number one, two and FOUR.

Of course, nowhere was it described which box contained what, so I had to open all of them right away. Which was really nice to do in my currently-cramped living room. (I’m going through some refurnishing right now, so there’s e.g. an extra bed).

As usually with furniture, all the pieces were letter-number-coded in the manual. This time, however, the letter in question was C for each and every piece. In other words, the item codes ran from C1 to C30.

I mean come on, what’s the point of having the C there in the first place? It didn’t contain any extra information beyond the numbers only.

They could – and should – have chosen different letters to refer to the four boxes, making the entire process a billion times easier. But that would have required…I don’t know what. I really don’t. Effort?

Oh, still remember the symmetry rule? The wardrobe guys didn’t. It had three (3) different types of 16 mm-long screws, something like 100 in total or so. The only difference between the three types being the diameter: 3, 3.5 and 4 mm respectively. To top things off, they were all stuffed inside the same big plastic bag along with everything else. So you can understand it was reaaaaaally nice trying to tell them apart.

I didn’t. I hope the blasted thing does not kill anybody when it collapses. That would be nice thing indeed to complement the 10-hour struggle that the assembly was.

On the positive side, it does look quite nice.

DFA