Title: Designerly Ways of Customising Introduction:
The designerly[1] nature
of mass customisation (MC) systems has been mentioned by early writers
including Alvin Toffler (1980, p. 274)
who, quoting Robert H. Anderson, stated: “The most effective thing a person
will do twenty years from now is to be very creative... Namely, you will be
sitting there doing things like designing a suit or making modifications to a
standard design”. While later studies acknowledge that design plays an
important role in MC (Berger and Piller, 2004, Franke and Piller, 2003, Ulrich
et al., 2003), little empirical work has been undertaken to facilitate an
understanding of the designerly nature of MC (Bee and Khalid, 2003). How do
companies divide design decisions between their designers and customers? And
how do customers utilise customisation tools to customise their own products?
These are fundamental questions to be answered when supporting customers as
co-designers of their own products. However, we have to appreciate MC systems
as design environments before calling customers 'co-designers' and systems
'collaborative design tools'. Simon (1981) defines design as “changing existing situations into preferred ones”. On this basis, anything we do in our everyday lives to change our extant situation is a design-like activity that requires us to make design decisions. At the same time, design is a highly professional activity: it demands considerable knowledge and competency. Lawson (2005) subscribes to a range of design-like activities, from selection and combination of predetermined items to professional design of artefacts for other people. In the case of this thesis, the place of MC in this wide range of design-like activities is the primary question. I have divided the study of “Designer Ways of Customising” into three work packages. First, I explore the designerly nature of customisation; then, I find the place of MC systems in the range of design activities; finally, I propose ways of developing customisation tools that improve customers’ experience as co-designers of their own products. [1] I use the term 'designerly' to reflect the nature of the design task and the kinds of problems designers tackle. Introducing this phrase, Cross (1982) brings these quotations from other researchers to describe the same concept: ‘Design with a capital D’, ‘sciences of artificial’, and ‘third culture’. |