Customization vs Personalisation

There’s been a real focus in the past year on 3D prototyping technologies and the opportunities that it gives to product designers and potential users. Along with the excitement, as expected, there are many buzz words flying around. The one that pricked my curiosity most was “CUSTOMIZATION”. And in most cases I thought it was totally the wrong word to use.

Maybe I am being picky, but I think customization is really interesting - and far more interesting - when we think of it as something distinct from personalisation and bespoke design, and therefore beyond the control of the design process (a post design stage and not necessarilly a pre-design stage).

The main distinction I see in customization is that it has that moment of hacking - in that a base product has been produced that lets you have access to its outer shell and/or innards, allowing you to mess around with it, add to it, change it, improve it, renew it, until you have created what you want. The process and the resulting object creates a positive experience that sits between making and using.

Rapid prototyping machines enables designers to produce very specific products that can meet the very specific and personal wishes of a potential purchaser. But this specific process on its own I think is bespoke design, albeit potentially cheap and quick bespoke design, and not necessarily customization.

Access Points for Customization

I have been customizing furniture, (chopping legs off, adding wheels, swapping doors, changing handles, stripping, re upholstering, patching, painting) long before I even thought about becoming a designer. At first it was mainly for economic reasons and later for more personal and emotional reasons – as this process allows you a certain sense of ownership of the product that goes far beyond the transaction process. It sows the foundations for your own personal narrative with the object. And because of the structure of most of the objects, my customization wishes were relatively easy to realise and my bond with the objects I shaped, timelessly strong.

And infact from what I saw on show at particularly at the Design Mai and from some of the reports of Milan was, whilst many products utilising 3D rapid protyping techniques offered many opportunities for bespoke designs, almost none of them seemed to be, (in my point of view) - customizable. There were some really beautiful objects; poetic interpretations of fleeting moments captured in 3D …

Attracted to Light - Geoffry Mann

… and shapes that defied traditional construction …

A1 Stool by Assa Ashuach, Solid CI Chair by Patrick Jouin

… but the access points had been magically 3d rapidly prototyped out! Moulded, sealed airbrushed. If you wanted to hack/customize any of these sophisticated constructions, it would most probably be with a very unsophisticated saw, causing havoc.

Growing Old Gracefully

And this really made me think. With all these new technologies and machines that are transforming our physical product landscape, what is going to happen to them when we get old. How are we going to look after them in their relative old age. Will their shape and form slowly transform and reflect the experience of living together? Will our very expensive, injection moulded, stapled and then sealed organic shaped chair grow old gracefully? Would we be able to take it to an upholster (or maybe we have something new like a sofa equivalent to a botox surgeon?) to get it all pumped up and fluffy again. Or will we just chuck it out and get a new model.

I think it is really interesting that in parallel to the new wave of bespoke - short run, niche - products, people are more than ever also scouring the flea markets for furniture to fill their homes (and not only for economic reasons).

Escaping Their Designed Destiny

I find Martino Gampers 100 chairs in a 100 days, (presented at the Design Museum) a really great example of old school customization at its most beautiful and most bold. And as he is working with both old and new furniture, it is clear the restrictions and opportunities he has with both, in giving them a new life, a new form. Crudley cutting and forcing plastic and foam, and rejoining and screwing the wood. But not everyone has his sensitivity to composition and textures, and talent in creating a perfect, quirky balance of furniture colliding. He is an experienced furniture hacker - inspiring his work with a new (unexpected) life.Martino Gamper’s Chairs at Vienna exhibition (taken from his site)

What would interest me are the ways that we can open up these new 3D rapid prototyped products to inexperienced furniture hackers; to see furniture/objects, that utilise modern techniques whilst also thinking of hidden access points where people can begin to mess around, and create things that the original designers perhaps never even thought of.