Julie Yessin is an industrial designer who recently received her MFA from Savannah College of Art and Design. I first met Julie at the MCP 2007 Conference in Boston, and agreed to be the topic advisor for her thesis: “CREATING HOLISTIC CUSTOMIZED SOLUTIONS: The Role of Design in the Mass Customization Process”. Part of the thesis involved analysing the customer experience offered in the mass customisation of sports shoes, which she has kindly agreed to let me reproduce here:

I recruited three study participants, Stephanie, Corey, and Jordon, who are Industrial Design students at the Savannah College of Art and Design. The study has a slight bias since the students all said they would not have participated in the study if not given a fifty dollar compensation fee. As college students, they found the shoes to be expensive, but seized the opportunity to receive compensation so that they could purchase custom shoes at a lower price and have the experience of using their imagination to design customized footwear. At this stage in the development of customization, the early adopters are predominantly creative consumers who tend to be leading edge, and are intrigued by experimentation (Hippel, 2005). Although Nike is a brand that has a broad appeal, the NikeiD experience is clearly targeted to a younger demographic who are particularly interested in style. Therefore, it can be strongly argued that design students are ideal candidates for the study.

NikeID © Nike

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Bearing in mind I used to work for Nokia, I guess it’s inevitable that I follow what’s going on in the mobile phone world closer than most. But in the last couple of months I’ve seen a few things that are particularly relevant to my research, so this post will look at some of the issues involved with the customisation of mobile phones.

The first deliberately customisable phone was the Nokia 5110. Few people are aware that the initial reason for the 5110’s changeable cover was nothing to do with offering consumers choice though, rather it was an early attempt to employ just in time manufacturing in response to customer demand. Joseph Pine writes in Mass Customization about how just in time (JIT) strategies have often led to companies embracing mass customisation without necessarily realising it at the time.

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So far I have looked at ways in which rapid manufacturing technologies might become available to consumers, and the reasons why product design for rapid manufacturing is easier than for mass manufacturing. In the final part of this extended post I want to address the only other remaining hurdle to consumers designing and manufacturing their own products: the tools they will use to design with.

Consumer co-design, sometimes called co-creation, is a topic that’s been written about at length by design researchers. At it’s purest it involves the end user, or typical representatives of end users, entering the design process and creating products or services as part of a design team. In practice though, co-design is often little more than an enhanced customer research exercise. End users might be asked about their needs and desires, encouraged to offer suggestions, and even invited to critique proposed solutions. But there is no doubt it is the designers who are expert, and who make the final decision.

As a designer myself, I confess I find it difficult to break free of this mindset - surely my training and experience mean I am able to understand what a market of consumers will want better than an individual consumer themself might? But the point is, what I think will end up being irrelevant if consumers are able to design their own products. Why should a consumer care that I think their product is crass or crude, if it’s exactly what they want, and they’ve made it? At the moment though, I have one trick up my sleeve - I can use CAD, to design a product and to communicate that design to the means of production, in a way that no non-designer can. All the time designers and design engineers can monopolise the expertise needed to create CAD data, consumer created products will not happen.

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The final day of MCPC 2007 started early, but it wasn’t until after lunch that Professor Marvin Minsky gave what I thought was the most interesting keynote speech of the conference, entitled “The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of the Human Mind.”

Minsky is one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, having written extensively on both the science and philosophy of AI. To be honest I’m not sure his keynote had much to do with the theme of the conference, but there were still some choice quotes including

“We have robots to make things, but no robots to fix things”

“There’s no point sending humans to the moon before you’ve sent robots to build a hotel”

“If you understand something in only one way, you don’t really understand it at all”

“Common sense things that robots don’t know: you can use string to pull but not to push; things fall over if not supported; it’s hard to stay awake if you’re bored”

The stand-out session for me was by Bug Lab’s founder Peter Semmelhack. Although I’ve been aware of Bug Labs for a while I’ve not been completely clear about what they’re doing, but Semmelhack described how their open source approach to hardware aims to tap into the long tail of tomorrow’s consumer electronics market. Think of it like a Lego Mindstorms but for ‘real’ products - products which only a hundred or a thousand people might want to buy, rather than the tens or hundreds of thousands typically required for a profitable consumer electronics device. I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to work a Bug Labs product into my PhD, but it’s definitely something I want to play around with at some point.

And so that was the end of the conference. It’s been an excellent in-at-the-deep-end experience for me, really interesting, and encouraging also in terms of the enthusiasm people have shown for my own ideas. Tomorrow I’m flying back to the UK, but not before checking out Mr Bartley’s…

The second day of MCPC 2007 saw keynote speeches from Professor William J. Mitchell from MIT Media Lab and School of Architecture, Kent Larson, also from MIT Media Lab and School of Architecture, and my personal favourite, Professor Eric von Hippel from MIT Sloan School of Management. Von Hippel is well known for being among the first to talk about user innovation - the way that consumers modify, improve or invent products which meet their needs better than manufacturers’ standard offerings - and his presentation today, entitled “Toolkits for Collaborative User Innovation,” talked about ways in which companies can enable and benefit from users’ knowledge and creativity.

From watching von Hippel present, I got the feeling he is an accomplished speaker who deliberately overstates his case in order to create a memorable impression. Thus I took with a pinch of salt his assertion that in future, expert users who freely reveal their designs in the spirit of the open source movement will swamp manufacturers who try to protect their inventions behind patents. Nonetheless he had some interesting examples to back up his argument, in particular the case of the kite surfacing community.

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