Use Photoshop as a Weapon
In former times you used a pen to disfigure ads you didn’t like - false moustaches come to mind. Nowadays you can complete advertisings in an almost seamless way (see above) - which is kind of interesting as a new form of dialog. As a little background information: Other than a big pile of rubble there is nothing left of the name-giving factory, on which ground these lofts will be built. The former sweet smell of marzipan has been replaced by a stink of false nostalgia in this PR move. Hence the ironic call to be up in arms!

Continuing the theme of my previous post - I spotted this today, by chance, outside the cafe where I was having my coffee.

‘we make remake’ Martino Gamper and Rainer Spehl - outside cafe Toast, Helmholz Platz

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.

Although roomy, quick and clean, the most interesting thing about Singapore’s underground system is not traveling on it, but planning your trip and purchasing your ticket (at least from an interaction design perspective). Both these steps are in fact integrated into one machine and are part of the same process:
The main interface of ticket machines consists of a screen embedded into a backlit map of the entire underground system. This map, however, not only visually aids the customer’s choice of destination, but is actually touch-sensitive. So after choosing, say, the single-ticket option from the screen on the left, customers select their destination by pressing the respective station.
If one assumes that the average traveler’s picture of the underground system is that of its standard map, then this process appears to be much more intuitive and ultimately superior to selecting a destination from a multi-page alphabetical list (as is the case in London or Berlin). This combination of selection and purchasing, however, also has its disadvantages as undecided customers may block the machines for those who know where they are heading.

Single-trip tickets are dispensed in the form of reusable plastic cards (contactless smart cards using RFID technology), for which a S$1 refundable deposit is payable (about 50 Euro cent). This approach not only saves ink and trees, but effectively eliminates any wastage resulting from used tickets, as the cards are fed back into the machine to reclaim the deposit.

It is somewhat peculiar, by the way, that I did not find any ticket machines at Changi Airport station to get my dollar back before flying home…

When taking pictures of these snazzy 24h book return terminals outside the National Library in Singapore, some lady selling t-shirts nearby noted sarcastically: “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Only slightly embarrassed, I told her that this was part of my job (cough, cough). Still amused, she was nice enough to explain to me how the system worked.
Basically, books are passed through a large rectangular slot, being identified by a barcode scanner. Once a book is identified, the customer receives two forms of feedback. One is via a text display (changing from “Ready” to “Returned” and then back again), the other is via a live video feed from inside the terminal, showing the book actually slide into the return box inside: a simple but very elegant way to give the user instant positive feedback!