Thirteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

Recently, both social life and work activities are increasingly carried out in online contexts, composed of bits and pixels, which are light, cheap, and easy to modify, so digital products are often tailored to user preferences, sometimes even automatically. Computational design might bring a similar “malleability” to the physical context: on-demand digital manufacturing can produce personalized objects, while avoiding environmentally harmful over-production and unsellable stocks. Digitally “tailor-made” products also promote a proactive attitude to the material culture, potentially involving the users’ creative capabilities in a personalization (or co-design) process. This kind of involvement seems a natural extension of industrial mass customization, as well as the growing culture of Fablabs, Makers or “open source” communities, which helped to democratize digital fabrication technologies. On average, however, the everyday environment is still dominated by mass manufactured goods. This contribution presents a way of exploring product categories where personalization and digital manufacturing can make sense. To do so, a series of case studies helped to identify six personalization principles, which can have an either mechanical or cognitive nature. A structured attempt to apply these principles to existing product categories can help discovering new design opportunities of (computationally) personalisable products, so a novel concept design method is proposed, to be practiced through a specific design tool: Computational Concept Canvas. The presented method and tool promote a “computational BY design” approach, which uses computation as a tool to shift the material culture towards a better fit to the physical-social-cultural context of each user.