How Building Flat Pack Furniture Reveals Your Learning Style

We all know three different types of people when it comes to building the dreaded flat pack furniture. We know activists, who will assemble the flat pack before reading any of the instructions (with varying degrees of success). We know the reflectors who like to lay every single piece out on the floor and ponder the design of each part and how it works before they pick up a screwdriver, and the diligent theorist who reads the instructions twice first, and makes sure you read them too. Finally, we all know that one pragmatist who will build the flat pack quickly, but be far more excited about what the furniture can do once it’s built. Each approach might result in success or failure, but regardless those people will stick to their style time and time again (my father once assembled a chest of drawers back to front, twice). Most people will just chalk this up to how good they are with their hands and their practical skills – after all some people just aren’t great at DIY. But it’s actually more to do with what’s going on with your brain.

 

Visual Learners Won’t Read, But See

Most instructions for flat pack furniture come with pictures. Each piece is drawn out and each stage of construction is detailed with arrows instructing which way things should be put together. This is so that you can easily tell if you are doing it right by just comparing the image to what you’re holding. It’s unsurprising then that visual learners will have few problems assembling flat pack furniture in record time (I checked, there isn’t one at the moment, so consider it a challenge) from just the pictures. They can easily visualise the objects and see how they will go together, so many visual learners might not even need to read the instructions to understand how everything fits together. They understand it simply from looking at all of the pieces. However, this is not true of all visual learners. For some, they need to be able to take the images and turn them into a 3D structure in order to understand how to put it together, and this sometimes isn’t possible just from the images given. If a visual learner struggled to turn the images into a 3D structure, they might leave the assembly to a kinaesthetic learners. 

Audio Digital Learners Will Take Their Time

Audio digital learners are all about the logic of the construction. Unlike the other learning styles it isn’t directly related to our senses, but instead to how we think about things. An audio digital learner faced with a flat pack will often read then instructions and think about them for some time, developing an understanding of why the steps are in that order and if it is the most logical way to do it. Once they have thought it through they will then build it based on the instructions and their sense of logic, potentially opting to alter the instructions if they don’t make sense to them. For example, ‘this glued dowel will break and not hold this piece in place, but if I screw the pieces together it will be a stronger structure.’ They might take their time building it, but ultimately they produce good results.

Kinaesthetic Learners Will Build It Quickest

Because kinaesthetic learners are all about doing things with their hands, flat pack furniture is like breathing for them. Kinaesthetic learners will often not read the instructions, but instead they will look at an image of the finished piece and turn it into a sort of 3D rendering. From this 3D base they then put the pieces together to create it, almost like reverse engineering. Sometimes the order they do things in might not be the same as the instructions, but they will quickly be able to build the flat pack to look and operate the way it was supposed to.  Because they can visualise every aspect of the finished object, kinaesthetic learners will rapidly understand what they need to do with the pieces and build the furniture very quickly.  

Tonal Learners Will Need Someone Else

To clarify, I don’t mean that tonal learners need someone to just do the whole thing for them, you understand. But tonal learners are incredibly aurally focussed, preferring to hear things out loud to make sense of them. Tonal learners work best with flat packs when someone else is reading out the instructions to them or telling them what to do next, rather than using the instructions themselves. When building flat pack furniture as a team, the person with the most leaning towards tonal learning will often opt to collect the pieces or build the unit, while the other co-ordinates and reads out the instructions.

We often only think of our individual learning style as being relevant while we are at school and actively learning all day every day. But the way our brains are wired to learn things and understand the world affects everything new we do throughout our adult lives as well. It impacts how we view challenges, how we learn new skills and how we implement those skills once learned. Our thought processes and reasoning will be different depending on our learning styles, and even the way we assemble furniture all comes down to that simple understanding of how we learn. If you would like to find out more about learning styles and how you can use them to teach and learn more effectively, follow my blog or get in touch through my website.