Introduction

Minimalism is a modern art style that began in post World-War II in 1960s. The
feature of minimalism is minimizing structure and showing the original appearance of
the workpiece to public. Even now this art style becomes one of the main trend of
design in the world. Flat packed furniture has a similar idea behind those simple and
user-friendly design. Moreover, for stabilizing the quality of those furniture, CNC
milling machine may help the manufacturer to produce flat packed furniture. In this
essay, we will focus on discussing about the relation of economy and design on flat
packed furniture and CNC milling. Also, we will give some example to keep it more
rational to analysis about these two modern inventions.

CNC Milled furniture

What is CNC milling.
Milling is a machining process similar to do the task of drilling and cutting. It is also
able to achieve many of the operations performed by cutting and drilling machines.
However, the driller in a milling machine is able to move along multiple axes.
Therefore, it can create a variety shape of the workpiece. CNC, computer numerical
controlled, is evolved technique from NC. NC is simply a way of electronically
controlling the operations of a machine. From 1980s, CNC replaces the NC technique
to make it automatic. CNC milling devices are the most widely used type of CNC
machine. Typically, It can be functioned by the calculation and analysis 3 to 5 axes of
the work piece from computer. In CNC milling, most of it will use G-code which is
standardized programming language to CNC machine. CNC millings have many
functions including tapping, drilling and so on. Because of the CNC millings
function, it can create a lot of complicated structure design. Moreover, CNC milled
furniture was appeared by CNC milling.
CNC milled furniture
CNC milled furniture is one of the examples of self-assembly furniture. Its used
wood or acrylic plastic to be the main materials in building the structure of furniture.
There are a few features of CNC milled furniture. First of all, the design of CNC

milled furniture is really flexible because this type of furniture is calculated and
simulated by computer. Therefore, the designer may do complicated idea on the
furniture. For instant, designers are able to do some complex carvings on their work
piece via CNC milling but it will not affect the quality of their work piece.

Otherwise, CNC milled furniture can rival to other furniture in more reasonable price
with high quality. Plywood is one of the common materials using in CNC milled
furniture. One of the obvious benefits of plywood is easy for designer and
manufactory to do the construction of curved surfaces. Plywood can be cut and
shaped with basic tools. Compared to other wood products, plywood can be changed
and retain the shape easily and can be done so without the threat of warping.
Moreover, nowadays, the trend of modern architectural design is to create organic
surfaces. It causes the CNC milled furniture uniqueness and popularity in the market.
In economics, CNC milled furniture causes some influences to different roles. As far
as the manufactory is concerned, CNC milling can help them to shorten the time on
producing the furniture. They do not need to assemble the furniture to the retailer and
they just need to do the process of producing the components of CNC milled furniture.
Moreover, the accuracy of CNC milling can ensure that they do not need to put more
resources of checking the quality and reproduce of problematic furniture. Otherwise,
during the producing process, they just need technicians to control CNC milling. This
will help them to control the human resources easily.
In the view of retailer, CNC milled furniture can help them to save the cost. It is
because the cost of furniture production is less expensive than ready-to-use furniture.
Therefore, they do not need to pay higher price to the manufactory. They can also
provide more reasonable price to customers stimulate their motivation of consumption

thereby to increase the company's profits. Besides, they can reduce and cost on
shipping the product from warehouse to customers. CNC milled furniture in one of
the ready-to-assemble furniture that can easily deliver to other location and storage in
warehouse. It helps the retailers to save their payout indirectly.
For the designers, they can design some robust furniture structure without the need for
power tools or nails. It is because the structure of CNC milled furniture is based on
the use of wooden fins which lock together to form stable structure. Furthermore, the
flexibility of CNC milled furniture is very high. For example, Opendesk is a company
that focuses on using CNC milling to produce furniture and a global platform for local
making in United Kingdom. The users may choose what they want to be in the
making of their furniture from download and mill by themselves. The user may also
choose material that may depend on what local makers offer in the Open Marketing
system. Therefore, users can decide what furniture they want to assemble via CNC
milling flexibly.

Flat Packed Furniture

History of Flat Packed Furniture
Flat packed furniture is a piece of furniture that is sold in pieces packed flat in a box
for easy transport from warehouse to customers and can be assembled by users easily.
Gills Lundgren, Swedish draughtsman, invented this modern furniture in 1956. The
story goes that he bought a table and had to cut its legs off to be able to fit it into his
car. This experience gave him the idea of manufacturing furniture in kit form. It
caused the idea of flat packed furniture until now. Nowadays, there are a lot of
categories of furniture in the market of flat packed furniture. According to IKEA
website, flat packed furniture can be adapted in living room, bedroom, outdoor and so
on. It also proves that flat packed furniture can supply different type of furniture to
satisfy the market demand.
Example of flat packed design
With the rapid development of the world, people are getting closer through Internet.
Thus, people become more confident on online purchase and the need of flat packed
design gradually turns stronger in the fact that flat packed design can be transported
easily. Take IKEA as an example, its an international furniture industry. Hence, mass

distribution to countries is an important process of them. Therefore, flat packed

furniture is designed to solve the problem of resource allocation. On the other hand,
flat packed furniture is also designed for customization. Thus, users may have more
options on assembling furniture to fit their space.
Economics
The most obvious advantage of flat packed furniture is less expensive than
ready-to-use furniture. The reason behind this benefit is about the relationship
between manufacturers and retailers. In the production process, manufacturers can use
less resources, duration and money on producing the furniture components. Moreover,
they always use automated operation to reduce the errors and maintain a high quality
of all components or furniture. Manufacturers can reduce unnecessary expenses and
time of the process effectively. In addition, flat packed furniture is easy to separate
different elements and simplify the delivery to minimize operating costs to ideal level.
Retailers may do not need to hire contractors to help customers to assemble the
furniture. Retailers may also retrench the money of hiring porters to deliver the
furniture from warehouse to customers home when customers decide to deliver the
furniture by themselves. Therefore, to conclude of this relationship, retailers can
provide the less expensive price to have win-win situation in all roles.
Another undoubted benefit of flat packed furniture is that it can fulfill a demand of the
market in this century. Nowadays, the area of resistance house becomes smaller than
past few years. It is because the population is still increasing continuously but the land
supply may not be insufficient to satisfy the needs. Thus, saving place is one of the
new considerations of buying furniture. Flat packed furniture can be able to fit into
small spaces as they are built to have sliding features that reduces space.
Consequently, flat packed furniture can fulfill the market demand and help the
retailers to increase their revenue.

Reference:
Bridget Borgobello (2013). OpenDesk offers open source furniture designs for local
manufacture.
Retrieved from
http://www.gizmag.com/opendesk-open-source-diy-furniture/28813/
IKEA.com (2015) Our Business Idea
Retrieved from
http://www.ikea.com/ms/en_GB/about_ikea/the_ikea_way/our_business_ide
a/our_low_prices.html
thomasnet.com(2015) More about cnc milling
Retrieved from
www.thomasnet.com/about/cnc-milling-51276103.html
FLAT PACK DAN(2013) How Did Flat Pack Furniture Come About?
Retrieved from
http://www.flatpackdan.com/blog/how-did-flat-pack-furniture-come-about/
Object Guerilla (2014) Flat-Pack Design: Past, Present, and future
Retrieved from
http://objectguerilla.com/blog/2014/1/20/flat-pack
Dave Pinter, PSFK (2014) Beautiful And Functional Designs Are Elevating
Flatpack Furniture [NYCxDesign]
Retrieved from
http://www.psfk.com/2014/06/flatpack-nycxdesign.html