The modern barn raising: how the Ikea effect creates belonging
Alex Hillman
In the summer of 2007, nearly two dozen people gathered in Old City Philadelphia to sign up for Indy Hall memberships.
What surprises people about this moment in our history is that this happened before we signed the lease to our first space.
These people weren’t exactly co-founders, in the traditional business or startup sense.
But without them, we would not have signed the lease, and more importantly, I think Indy Hall would look and feel very different today.
Reflecting back, I think this moment matters most because our founding members weren’t buying access to a coworking space, they were becoming co-creators of a thing they wanted to see exist.
The Ikea Effect Meets Amish Traditions
So we had a community who wanted to be around each other, and had the keys to an empty room to gather.
But not much else.
Next stop? Ikea!
Ikea was the obvious choice for the bootstrap-friendly price point, plus the ability to easily swap parts and pieces in the future.
But the real magic came after we hauled the flat pack boxes out of the car and into our tiny cargo elevator.
We invited our founding members (and friends!) to show up with tools and help set up those first dozen or so desks together.
Much like the old-fashioned barn raisings of nearby Lancaster PA, where the community comes together to literally build a barn for a new neighbor, our modern day barn raising invited people to contribute to something they wanted and helped them feel like they’re a part of something bigger than themselves.
Those members did so much more than hold a drill or a screwdriver. They shaped the outcome, together.
A few years later in 2011, researchers at Harvard, Duke, and Yale coined “The Ikea Effect” to formally describe the experience of placing a higher value on something that you played a part in creating.
That said, we didn’t need the research to validate what we already knew: involving our community in the co-creation of the place we share led to a different sense of ownership than was possible otherwise.
Not ownership necessarily in the legal sense, but in the emotional and connective sense. The kind of ownership that drives people to care for their neighborhoods, to support causes they believe in.
And it turns out, that sense of ownership is also a huge element of belonging.
How we create belonging in 2025
Between the rapid rise of remote work, a few years of mandatory isolation due to COVID, and fractured social structures online and offline, the craving for belonging has never been higher.
What’s interesting is that the challenge has flipped, in contrast to our origin story.
In this era, we DO have a space, and easily the nicest space we’ve ever had.
But things like the Ikea effect don’t happen “automatically” when the furniture is already assembled and the space is nicely appointed.
We have to create those opportunities, and highlight when they happen.
Most recently, we got to see this in a big way during our Indy Hall “MiniBar” event that invited members to dream and discuss the future of Indy Hall as they see it.
Soon after, a cast of members stepped up to help out while Adam was away on vacation, which has opened the doors to ideas and discussions about how we can expand that kind of member support and contribution beyond our core team going forward.
More members are coming to us with ideas and desire to step up and lead within the community. It’s still early days for this shift, but it’s palpable and exciting.
Because if people don’t see a way to contribute, it’s just a space.
If people don’t see the paths to shaping the experience for themselves and others, to making their mark, to giving of themselves to each other, it’s just a space.
For nearly 20 years, Indy Hall has always been a vessel for making things possible.
Sometimes that vessel is the literal space, sometimes it’s other resources we share.
But it’s the co-creation that defines who we are!
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