THE IKEA generation know the score. You buy some flat-packed furniture, ignore or lose the instructions, then lash the thing together with a growing sense of frustration that culminates in blind rage.
But that could become a thing of the past, if Stavros Antifakos gets his way. He has built a flat-pack kit whose parts are fitted with cheap microprocessors that monitor what you’re doing during assembly and warn you if you’re doing something wrong or dangerous.
Antifakos and his colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have found 44 different paths that someone working without the…
