Unto This Last is a furniture studio and workshop, based on two sites in London. Its name comes from the title of a book by John Ruskin, published in 1862, in which he advocated a return to localised, craftsman/artisan workshops as an antidote to the conditions which industrialisation had imposed on much of Britain’s working class. As a fore-runner of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement, Ruskin’s thoughts were influential, but the rising standard of living which mass manufacturing brought to the West meant that his pleas were ultimately seen as anachronistic. But according to Olivier Geoffrey, founder of Unto This Last, CNC machining and on-demand manufacturing open up possibilities for the craftsman in the community which may yet see Ruskin’s vision realised.

D Chair © Unto This Last

For the last month or so I have been teaching on the MA Industrial Design course at Central St Martins in London, on a project titled “manufacturing and consumption futures”. The project  is intended to encourage students to research the opportunities which new production methods allow for more personalised products, to propose and refine a system of their own, and ultimately to prototype the system itself. I hope to show some of the outcomes in a later post, but as part of the research for the project students were invited to Unto This Last’s Brick Lane workshop, to look around and to quiz Olivier about his philosophy.

Facet Sideboard © Unto This Last

Olivier began by explaining how, if you’re engaged in design, you’re inevitably bound up in the distribution systems of the products you’re designing. A designer working at Ikea, for example, doesn’t design flat pack furniture just for the sake of it, or even because it’s part of the Ikea brand experience. Flat pack systems allow customers to transport their purchases home from the store and then assemble the furniture themselves, which is crucial for keeping costs down. Whereas a designer working for Cassina knows that the assembly and transportation costs will be tied up in the price the furniture, and can therefore rely on skilled craftsmen using specialised tools to build a piece of furniture, rather than an untrained consumer with an allen key.

Honeycomb Shelves © Unto This Last

Unto This Last’s designs are similarly a reflection and a result of distribution systems and logistics. A customer who visits the store can see some examples of the products on sale, but with the exception of a few small gift items, no products are held in stock, instead they are manufactured to order. This reduces the costs of storage and inventory, whilst also allowing the company to carry more than 2000 items its catalogue. Orders are made in-store and delivered pre-assembled, and because the furniture is shipped direct from the store it means packaging is also greatly reduced. In this way, by using digital manufacturing processes and some of the techniques recognisable from other mass customisation initiatives, Unto This Last can offer custom-made furniture at close to mass-production prices.

Nurbs Coffee Table © Unto This Last

Unto This Last uses laminated birch ply for all its products. Clearly the material has properties, both visual and functional, which many designers in the past have found interesting, and it would probably be naive to suggest that the only reason for using the material is its fit within Unto This Last’s distribution chain. Nonetheless, it is remarkably suitable for helping Olivier realise his vision. To begin with plywood is very dimensionally stable, and has uniform properties in all directions (unlike natural timbers, where grain and knots affect the strength and shape of the material). It also doesn’t shrink. This means that parts can be machined on a CNC router with a high degree of accuracy (typically Unto This Last manufacture to tolerances of 0.1mm); such precision also simplifies the process of assembling the finished furniture piece – less finishing is required, and glue dries under the natural pressure of the fit, without the need for clamping. Using laminates also allows Unto This Last to effectively design its own materials – both workshops (in Brick Lane and Battersea) have presses for applying ’standard’ veneers of oak, walnut, maple and a melamine coated surface, as well as allowing experimentation with bespoke surfaces such as fabric, leather and paper.

The CNC router used at Unto This Last’s Brick Lane workshop

The use of birch ply laminates undoubtedly plays a part in the consumer acceptance of this way of working – because the material is relatively uniform it means a customer can be confident that the piece of furniture delivered to them will be virtually identical to the one they saw on display. But the material also has a significant impact on the both the designs of Unto This Last’s furniture, and the process of design which leads to them. Parts are designed which anticipate the requirements of production, they incorporate tapers, chamfers, clearances etc which can be machined rather than relying on a furniture maker to create joints and fixtures by hand. Design elements which are proven to work on one product are reused in new products, and so a vocabulary, both technical and aesthetic, has built up. All of Unto This Last’s products are built in Solidworks, and by using equation driven parameters a design can easily be modified such that changing one dimension will cause all other critical dimensions to update. The company has also put a significant amount of effort into developing custom API’s to calculate the most efficient way of laying out parts before they are machined.

Pierre, a designer at Unto This Last, demonstrates a CAD model of a table

How the constituent parts of a fully assembled piece of furniture are machined turns out to be a significant issue for Unto This Last. Not only does it make sense to save costs by wasting as little of a laminated sheet as possible, businesses in London have to pay per kg of waste, which provides another incentive to make efficient use of each sheet. Typically the workshop will take two weeks worth of orders, computer software then creates a ‘cutting map’ for each sheet of laminate required. Where it’s not possible to use an area of the sheet for furniture that has been ordered, smaller gift items are incorporated into the cutting map to fill up the empty space. Again this demonstrates how Unto This Last are almost obsessive in the use of digital technologies to refine the manufacturing process; this is the key difference, Olivier explained, to more expensive furniture makers where a significant amount of cost is tied up in waste and poorly optimized logistics.

Tea-Light Candle Holders © Unto This Last

Certainly the concept of a craft workshop in the centre of a city, enabled by digital technologies, where customers can see and hear and smell custom furniture being made, seems to have struck a chord: 40% of customers come from the recommendations of past clients, and a further 40% are people who just happen to see the store and are interested enough to look in. But Unto This Last goes against the flow of most mass customisation enterprises, which tend to be impersonal and usually offer no contact with the designer, and where cost reductions are achieved by off-shoring to faceless factories rather than opening an atelier in the middle of London. Just how successful Unto This Last is at realising Ruskin’s vision remains to be seen, but we’d have more interesting cities, and more interested customers, if it showed the way for others to follow.

Thanks to Olivier and Pierre for their time, and Ben Hughes for arranging the visit.

Detail of Tapered Ply Table © Unto This Last

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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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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