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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“We, the people, the untrained majority, are the future of design. We have the tools and we will be the masters of our personal environments… We’re not dumb consumers, we’re creative consumers… We won’t buy anything that isn’t uniquely specified by ourselves.” So begins an essay in July’s edition of Icon magazine, written by the editor Justin McGuirk.

Icon is a ‘glossy’ design mag in the same vein as something like Wallpaper, as such, whilst it’s read by designers, it’s aimed primarily at consumers. And so the article is something of an overview, and doesn’t go into enough depth to reveal anything which those with an interest in consumer design won’t have heard before. Nonetheless, there are some interesting opinions which clearly set out the ‘for’ and ‘against’ camps, and it demonstrates the extent to which fabbing, and consumer design are beginning to appear in the mainstream of design culture.

McGuirk begins by introducing sites such as Ponoko, Etsy, Shapeways and Materialise, and outlines how the cost of manufacturing is dramatically reduced when you move from mass-manufactured tooling to rapid manufacturing technologies. The article explains how the initial high investment which mass manufacturing requires leads to a fear of unpopular products, and thus to a design culture which seeks to minimise risk. At this point I felt like I was reading the introduction to my own thesis, so closely does it tie in to some of the things I’ve written in the past. McGuirk quotes Will Wright, designer of The Sims, who says

“It’s always surprised us [that] whenever we’ve given the players the opportunity to participate in the creation process, in every case they’ve exceeded our expectations. What they’ve done with the tools that we provide is always so far beyond what we thought was possible… When you have a million players all out there making stuff, against a small number of smart people always trying to do there best, it seems [the million] always win.”

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I recently got back from a trip to New York, having been there during ICFF and all the design week activities surrounding it. I was somewhat surprised at how little rapid manufactured furniture there was within the main show (unless you count laser cutting, which was impossible to avoid and demonstrated little that wasn’t being done five years ago), but outside .MGX was again showing it’s new collection at Moss, this year entitled E-volution. I should say straight off that the curation of this exhibition isn’t particularly clear: some of the pieces on display are from previous collections, and not everything in the new collection is on show. Nonetheless, it occurred to me whilst walking round that the designers and pieces involved fall into three distinct categories of the exploration of design for rapid manufacture.

.MGX by Materialise © Moss

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If you’re into the design of mobile phones, or high-end watches, there’s a good chance you will have read about Ulysse Nardin’s launch of a ‘hybrid’ cell phone recently. Developed in partnership with SCI Innovations, the Chairman is aimed at the luxury end of the market currently inhabited by Vertu and a few smaller industry players. Unlike those manufacturers however, Ulysse Nardin has a huge amount of experience and brand heritage, and is widely respected for it’s ability to combine traditional watchmaking skills with technological advancements (Ulysse Nardin has been granted more patents in mechanical watchmaking than any other manufacturer). This product represents a significant milestone for Ulysse Nardin – not only is it the first digital product they have made, it is also the first time they have partnered with another company. It is also significant for me personally, given that the industrial design of the product was carried out by my consultancy, Matt Sinclair Design.

Ulysse Nardin Chairman in rose gold © Ulysse Nardin / SCI Innovations

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I’m kind of snowed under with work right now, both in terms of the PhD and my professional practice, so this post is heavy on images and light on text (it’ll probably stay that way for the next couple of months, though if everything goes to plan I should have a lot to write about when this period is over). On a trip to London just after Christmas I visited my favourite design bookshop, Magma, and picked up Customise This, an edition of Graphic magazine. It’s basically a showcase of designers whose method of working involves customisation, and whilst some of the examples are stretching the meaning to its limits, there are others which very nicely illustrate the quirky, personal results that customisation provides. These are some of my favourites:

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