From Configuration to Design: Capturing the Intent of User Designers is the title of a paper I recently presented at MCPC 2009 in Helsinki. It details a user trial conducted as part of my PhD research, which sought to understand the extent to which non-professional user-designers are able to engage in design exploration and to communicate design intent. The paper itself, together with the presentation given at the conference, can be downloaded from the Papers and Presentations page of this site. Much of the background argumentation to the study has been made in previous posts, therefore what follows is an edited version of the paper, focusing on the design, conduct and conclusions of the user trial. This first post deals with the design and conduct of the study, a follow-up post will concentrate on the results and conclusions.

Design of the Study

The focus of the trial was the design of a USB memory stick. This was chosen as a relatively simple product whose functionality was easily recognised by those who took part in the study. The trial was intended to investigate two main research questions:
What is the best method for consumers to conduct design exploration?
How well are consumers able to communicate design intent?

It built on the observations of a number of researchers with regard to the way designers and architects use drawing as a way to generate and evaluate design solutions, but sought to place such observations more specifically within a mass customisation scenario. It also sought to understand the practical difficulties of expecting non-designers to use drawing in the same way that trained designers do. The intended outcome was to better understand what future tools will best enable consumer-design, which will form a major part of my future PhD research.

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Day two of the conference started with a keynote by David Gross and Jeff Beaver of Zazzle, together with James Johnson of Avery Dennison. Zazzle and Avery have recently launched a collaborative effort, the first example of which allows consumers to customise and order ring binders in a minimum quantity of one. In this instance Zazzle is acting as a ‘gateway’ to Avery’s manufacturing capabilities, with Avery producing the custom binders at their own facilities. James Johnson described clearly some of the challenges involved in setting up a mass customisation enterprise inside a business which has always excelled at mass production – Avery had already tried it’s own MC initiative before collaborating with Zazzle, but three days after the partnership launched there were 60 times the number of user-created designs than Avery had attracted in a year.

Looking back at my report on 2007’s MCP conference, I can see that I was somewhat disparaging of Zazzle, who I compared unfavourably to Ponoko and Threadless. Following this presentation I was much more impressed by what Zazzle has achieved and how fast they are advancing the benchmark of what consumers expect when customising products. For example, Zazzle has invested in body mapping capabilities more commonly used for special effects in the film industry, this allows custom clothing to be presented in a much more realistic way, with designs mapped onto folds in the fabric. And within the Zazzle system, users can open their own stores, setting their own prices for products and (in some cases) running a full time business by customising, and allowing others to customise, their designs.

Vintage Player by the3rdbase, printed on Heather Grey American Apparel T-shirt. The custom graphic maps over the folds of the fabric (click for larger image)

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The Mass Customisation and Personalisation conference here in Helsinki marks a couple of milestones for me. Firstly it means I’m a couple of years into the PhD, my progress in which is probably best characterised as ‘fitful’. At times it’s been racing ahead, but in the last few months it’s taken a back seat due to my professional workload. Secondly it’s the first conference where I’ve given a paper, but more about that in a later post. These next few entries are really a personal overview and reflection on the conference and some of the points raised.

The opening welcome was given by Matti Alahuhta, who I guess was technically my boss at one point at Nokia, and is now CEO of Kone. He gave a brief presentation of the ways in which Kone lifts can be customised, but disappointingly it wasn’t much more than a corporate gloss-over. He showed a few slides comparing Kone’s relatively ‘industrial’ products of just a few years ago to current products which show much more evidence of an ‘interior design’ approach, and I would have been interested to learn what this meant for the way the company and its designers worked.

The opening keynote speech was given by Joe Pine, who of course introduced a lot of people to the concept of Mass Customisation in his 1993 book. I had been looking forward to his presentation, because his speech at the previous MCPC in Boston had been one of the highlights of my conference. But to a large extent this was just a repeat of what was presented two years ago. I spoke to a few people who hadn’t been in Boston who thought the presentation was really interesting, but personally I felt a bit cheated.

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