I was recently interviewed by Duann Scott for Ponoko’s blog. He was kind enough not to edit my replies which meant the complete interview was spread over three posts. But now it’s been on Ponoko for a few days I’m putting here in it’s entirety:

What specifically brought on the idea to start incorporating consumer involvement into product design?

I’d always been interested in designing for people who are at the fringes of mainstream consumerism. When I was at the RCA my personal tutor was Tony Dunne, and he got me interested in the idea of looking at how people subvert products, (ab)use them in ways that weren’t intended by the designer. A mundane example is using a screw driver to open a tin of paint, a more ‘colourful’ example is using a vacuum cleaner as a sex aid. His theory was that you could learn a lot by looking at the way people invent new uses for products. Nowadays this isn’t particularly controversial, Eric von Hippel has written a lot about how mountain biking and kite surfing were ‘invented’ by people abusing existing products, but at the time it seemed very new, at least to me.

Gary Fisher (right) and friends were instrumental in the invention of the mountain bike © Trek Bicycle Corporation

When I first started at Nokia there wasn’t much opportunity to put these ideas into practice, at least not at first. But Nokia was the first company to introduce customisation into mobile phones in the form of user-changeable covers. That led to a lot of concepting exercises in the design team, thinking about how customisation could be expanded further. I guess that’s where I first started to realise the logical conclusion of consumers customising products is consumers designing their own products. But at the time there didn’t seem to be any way it could be possible.

What from this experience inspired you to undertake your PhD into consumer created designs?

To be honest, that wasn’t the focus of the PhD when I started. It began with me looking at the way rapid manufacturing technologies would change the industrial design process, and I was thinking more along the lines of consumers working alongside designers, what’s usually called user-centred design. Again whilst I was at Nokia, I had run a project where we worked with professional sports people to design a range of products; we interviewed them at the beginning of the project, and then repeatedly asked them to review the designs and models and to give their feedback. But as my PhD research continued, I started to realise that the user-centred design process is still a process where the designer is in control, where the designer is the ‘expert’ and has the power to veto features or suggestions from the user. And it became clear that the reason for this is that the designer has access to the means of production, ie factories and machines, which the user does not. Rapid manufacturing changes that completely. When 3D printers are available to consumers, they will begin to design and make their own products whether professional designers like it or not.

Current rapid prototyping techniques seem to be the starting point for consumer driven design outside of the current standard paradigm which in most cases is really just multiple choice. What do you see the major limitations of an RM model once the cost is reduced/out of the equation?

There are two main ones, which both come down to the question of ‘quality’. The first is that the surface finish of parts made by rapid prototyping or rapid manufacturing is relatively poor compared to mass manufactured products: they tend to have ridges, or rough surfaces, and the colours are limited. But these are gradually improving, and it’s worth remembering that injection moulding is a process that’s 140 years old. 3D printers and other rapid manufacturing technologies are still in their infancy by comparison. The second limitation is the tools that consumers have available to design their own products. This is hard enough in 2D, which is why I imagine Ponoko has introduced Photomake, for people who can’t use Adobe Illustrator. 3D Computer Aided Design is much harder to learn, most designers take at least three years to get good at a single CAD package. So there needs to be much simpler modelling tools, and that’s now a significant part of my research. But again there are signs that things are moving: Google SketchUp and 3DVia Shape are undoubtedly consumer-oriented, and Shapeways Creator and FluidForms show some interesting approaches. I also think there’s a hell of a lot to learn from Spore Creature Creator, in the way it both helps and restricts you in designing new creatures.

‘Spike’ by Thanos Bakopoulos (my eight year old nephew), created with the Spore Creature Creator © Electronic Arts

One thing that’s important about ‘quality’ though, is that it depends how you view things. Consumer culture is primarily visual, and we judge the quality of products, at least in the first instance, by how how they look. We’ve come to judge the quality of a product by it’s appearance, and in that sense the production values of mass manufacture are a lot higher than those of rapid manufacture. But think of another category such as film. Blair Witch Project or 28 Days Later or Dogville had much lower production values than a typical Hollywood blockbuster, but people ignored the rough edges and focussed on the quality of the idea rather than the polish of the celebrities or special effects. I think that when we can make products in much lower volumes, they will be better able to meet the needs of individuals rather than the mass market which products are aimed at nowadays. And it could be that if a product is designed specifically for you, especially if you’ve designed it yourself, those rough edges won’t be as important as the idea behind the product.

The Blair Witch Project cost only $22,000 to make © Artisan Entertainment

What do you see as the best examples of mass customisation currently available?

It’s not one that gets mentioned very often, but I find the Build-A-Bear concept really interesting. It seems to understand the target market very well, and offers the right degree of customisation, what I mean is the level of complexity is just right for the target audience. The experience of using the website is entirely consistent with the company’s overall branding, which in many other examples isn’t the case. Also the fact that there are both web-based and physical stores. It starts me wondering whether one day you’ll be able to visit an Apple store and design and make your own iPod right there.

© Build-A-Bear Workshop Inc

Another example I really like is MySpace, which isn’t often though of as an example of mass customisation. But actually it offers a platform for people to design their own sites, so I think there’s a lot to learn from the way it’s used. People aren’t designing pages based on what a mass audience will like, it’s for a very limited audience - the user and their friends. When graphic designers or usability experts look at MySpace they recoil in horror! And it’s true, most of the pages are terrible. But as far as the user is concerned it’s perfect, they couldn’t care less what the ‘experts’ think. That kind of ‘punk’ attitude of just going out and doing it appeals to me a lot.

How important is the retention of brand integrity in the equation of product aesthetics if consumers have the power to fundamentally alter a products design? ie. when does a customised nokia phone cease to be a nokia??

It’s a really important question, and I think there are two ways that brands can go. As I said, when consumers gain control of the means of production, they will start to do these things, design and customise and alter a product’s appearance, whether designers and brands like it or not. So one option is for brands to try and stamp it out, by making it harder to do those things, and by enforcing copyright etc in the courts. But my feeling is that option is doomed to fail - when people can distribute CAD files as easily as MP3 files, for free, brands will find themselves in the same situation as record companies. And we know that DRM and threatening P2P hosts has had no effect on file sharing. So the other option is to find a business model which embraces it.

One way is similar to the NikeID model: build a ‘platform’, then make it easy for people to design a unique product but use restrictions to ensure brand integrity remains. Depending on which shoe you choose to customise, Nike restrict the colour options such that it’s harder to make a ‘mistake’, and harder to compromise the brand’s integrity. Another model is to open things up, allow people to do what they want, but make it clear the brand bears no responsibility for the outcome. This is similar to computer games companies releasing software developer’s kits, which make it easy to mod the game, but with the result that some mods are rubbish, some don’t work, some infringe other companys’ copyright, and some are really good. I’m sure there are other ways to do it also, and different companies will take different approaches. But we should probably understand that modern-day branding is a result of mass manufacture and mass consumerism (one of my favourite quotes is that cowboys invented branding because all their cows looked the same). We shouldn’t expect the same rules to apply when it’s possible to make products in extremely low volumes, even one-offs.

NikeID © Nike

Do you see the role of the industrial designer fundamentally changing or do you believe it will only be in niche markets where mass customisation processes will need to be incorporated into design practice?

It’s always tempting when imagining the future to think that new technologies will kill off old ways of doing things. But that’s rarely true, and even where it is it takes a long time. There are still a lot of people writing letters, despite e-mail and text messaging. TV didn’t kill radio (and the internet has made it stronger), and industrial farming didn’t kill off organic farming, either in the rich first world or the poor third world. So I would be reluctant to say that all industrial design practice will fundamentally change. But having said that, the job of some designers will be very different to their job today. Some will be niche, designing only for small specialised markets. Some will be designing the platforms that allow consumers to design their own products, deciding which elements of a product can be changed and which are fixed. And some people will practice industrial design even though they may not be trained and it may not be their full time job. Mass production will be around for a long time though, particularly for ‘low value’ items such as packaging, and those objects will likely be designed in a similar way as today.

Do you believe that the future of mass customisation for the consumer market will be primarily to modify/develop product use/function or aesthetics/form.

That’s a really difficult one, and I’m not sure I know the answer. In many ways it’s easier to change the way a physical product looks than the way it functions, because you can visualise a product’s appearance on a computer screen, but you need to use it before you know if the function has improved or deteriorated. Then again there’s a lot of research which suggests consumers place much more value in a product which works exactly as they want, rather than one which looks the way they like. So I could imagine groups or forums or wikis springing up, dedicated to finding the best way to improve a product’s function, posting findings and results and tips for ‘noobs’, with different solutions solving different needs. But improving function is more likely to be a group undertaking I think, rather than one which individual consumers carry out.

So in the same way that only a minority are actually involved in the coding of Firefox, compared to those who download it (and change its appearance), maybe only a minority actually work on improving the function of a product compared to those who download the CAD file, change the way it looks and print it out. In that sense there might be much more customisation of appearance, but the value that is appeciated the most is in the improved functionality.

Without giving away any IP or compromising your research, what do you see as the future of consumer driven design?

I guess, unhelpfully ;-), I would say there isn’t just one future but a number of different ones. One will be the idea of the corporation or brand encouraging users to design on top of its platform - the NikeID model; another is where consumers run riot doing whatever they can get away with - the MySpace model; and yet another is where consumers collaborate and share skills - the Wikipedia crowd sourcing model. I don’t know which of these will survive or if an entirely new way of working will emerge. I’d say Ponoko is closest to the MySpace approach, and I’d say this is a good thing though others may disagree! Probably my broad statement would be that when you put the means of production in the hands of consumers, they do things which traditional manufacturers cannot even dream of.