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.

The first sessions of the conference began just before lunch, and I presented in the ‘Success Stories: Mass Customization in Practice’ session. I was a bit surprised to be in this session – calling my work a success story is a bit premature! – but it seemed to go down well  and certainly raised some interest judging by the number of comments and questions I got during the rest of the conference. Also presenting in the same session was Gregor Jawecki of Hyve AG, who showed the competition which Swarovski recently ran, inviting users to submit jewellery designs. The competition ran in two parts – in one section users were able to use a configuration tool and build designs from pre-existing chains, pendants and gems; whereas an alternative section allowed users to upload freely created designs. 1790 participants created 3180 designs, of which 2200 were configured and 980 freely designed. What I found interesting was that the freely submitted designs were judged by a jury of ‘experts’, whereas the configured designs were judged by the competition community – this obviously suggests a prejudice on the part of the organisers as to what constitutes ‘real’ design (as does the difference in prizes for the two competitions). It would be interesting to know why Swarovski opted for the jury system – was it because they didn’t trust the community to identify the best designs, or instead that they thought ‘real’ designers would be put off submitting if their work was judged by interested amateurs rather than industry professionals? Whatever the reason, by placing configured designs so closely next to freely created designs, the competition clearly highlights the limitations of configurators in terms of the freedom they allow the user, and in that sense my own presentation fitted quite nicely into the session.

1st prize in the ‘Basic Passion’ category of freely uploaded designs © Isabelle Lopes France

1st and 2nd prizes in the ‘Configured Designs’ category © Mehmet Genc and Mônica Maués

Following lunch, Bruce Kasanoff presented a keynote speech on the theme of ‘The Emerging Personalization Economy’. Kasanoff, who runs the Now Possible blog, believes that in eight years the world’s economy will be driven by personalization, and he used a number of examples from the fields of education, healthcare and security to reinforce this belief.

To be honest the Monday afternoon sessions didn’t have that much to interest me. The standout presentation, which I attended almost by accident, was by Fabrice Alizon, who talked about the Model T Ford as one of the first examples of mass customisation. This is a somewhat provocative assertion, since Henry Ford and the Model T are generally thought of as the paradigm of mass manufacture. But as Alizon explained, the Model T underwent so many modifications throughout its life that it is almost impossible to attribute any one model to any one year. Around 5% of Model T’s were customised, i.e. modified versions of the standard offerings, and for much of its life the Model T was available in a range of colours other than black. This isn’t to say that Ford itself mass customised products – it had a number of models based on a standard platform – but by also selling that product platform (chassis, engine and drivetrain) as a stand-alone item, it allowed customers or third party body shops to create the customised vehicle. In many ways, this is close to the way I imagine user-designed products might be realised in future – a manufacturer sells a core product and the consumer prints out a ‘shell’, either one that has been self-designed or a design bought from someone else. It was kind of interesting to realise that one of the ways I’ve been envisaging the future of product design and manufacture was actually pioneered by henry Ford almost 100 years ago. Alizon’s full paper is available here (subscription required).

The Model T product platform, Clymer, F. (1955), Henry’s Wonderful Model T, Bonaza Books, NY

Customised Model T’s. All images © Model T Ford Club of America