About
OurKea
Ourkea is a customizable furniture kit, so that the pieces you receive are always specific to your needs. We want to help you maximize your use of space and make it feel personal at the same time.
Affordability x Compact Living
Dense city centres with skyrocketing property values makes raising a family in an urban setting increasingly difficult.
How it Works
The website works like a user interface, for you to find the furniture you need and customize the dimensions or style. Because every piece is designed with ¾” Plywood and manufactured with just a CNC, any certified local “maker” can load the data from the site and create your parts. They get shipped in a flat pack to your apartment for you to assemble with no tools. As a bonus, these parts are simply plywood so they are ready to be modified or repaired by everyday tools.
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Design Principles
Ourkea is a customizable furniture kit, so that the pieces you receive are always specific to your needs. We want to help you maximize your use of space and make it feel personal at the same time.
Affordability x Compact Living
Dense city centres with skyrocketing property values makes raising a family in an urban setting increasingly difficult.
How it Works
The website works like a user interface, for you to find the furniture you need and customize the dimensions or style. Because every piece is designed with ¾” Plywood and manufactured with just a CNC, any certified local “maker” can load the data from the site and create your parts. They get shipped in a flat pack to your apartment for you to assemble with no tools. As a bonus, these parts are simply plywood so they are ready to be modified or repaired by everyday tools.
Design Principles
Make it CustomizableMass produced furniture serves standardized and generic needs. For furniture to be truly efficient in its utilization of space to serve unique needs and spaces, the user needs an interface for customization, and a manufacturing system that can support that.
Make it with CNCThe simplification of the manufacturing process hopefully leads to increased sophistication in the end product. Our framework is designed so that it can be made with any 3 axis CNC, while the possibilities for the end product are opened up beyond a typical catalogue of standard dimensions.
Make it Plywood
Sheets of plywood are generic enough to be sourced in most places, more resistant to warping than lumber, minimal finishing required, sustainable, hackable and affordable.
Sheets of plywood are generic enough to be sourced in most places, more resistant to warping than lumber, minimal finishing required, sustainable, hackable and affordable.
Make it Flatpack, DIYWe support DIY. It helps keep costs down from a transportation perspective and we believe its important that people feel empowered about their space. Knowing they have the ability to assemble, disassemble, and modify their space over time comes from seeing how they come together. Research also shows greater emotional attachment comes from being involved in the making of an object. Because of that, all of our pieces are designed to interlock and friction fit without glue or hardware, we use string where needed.
Make it AdaptableUnit layouts are hard to change, but families always grow. With this system, every piece of furniture can be made to utilize every last inch of space, because everybody lives in different units. And even as your family grows, its more sustainable and efficient to adapt your furniture with our modular and hackable kit, than it is to do renovations. This way, the stuff in your home is always for your family, their desires and needs, the best part is that complexity is not an added cost for CNC machines.
Sustainability
Currently, the most sustainable way of building is to not build, but if you are going to build its best to take advantage of existing building stock. So by addition of this kit, we can increase the density and decrease our footprint just by using plywood, a relatively sustainable material in Canada due to our logging industry,
At a more conceptual level, distributed manufacturing can help to disrupts current material flows as mass producers often create monopolies in supply chains, excessive transport from material source to factory to distributor, and ultimately distancing the consumer from the product. As an alternative, distributed manufacturing is more capable of sourcing materials locally (for example use of birch vs spruce depending on your region) and reduce the carbon footprint from transportation as distances are minimized, and even warehouses. All of this would be the underlying logic of our system and enabled by technology like the Internet of Things (IoT)
Distributed Manufacturing
Anybody with a CNC can become a member of the collective. Whether they are community makers spaces, fabrication shops, or school, members can operate based on a framework of how to deliver the project but have agency over other decisions allowing projects to be delivered with a specificity to place and people, creating a “vernacular” product.