Customization with constraints (restraint?)
There’s no doubt that the way we’ll be getting our “stuff of everyday life” is changing. New digital fabrication tools, powerful software, and fabrication networks like 100kGarages have the potential to transform the design and fabrication of just about everything. Many forms of manufacturing will leave distant factories and move closer to the customer, leaner and more agile, giving consumers the opportunity to have a hand (or at least a say) in the things that they get and use.
This brings with it the potential to customize almost every feature in any project in a myriad of ways…a bounty of choice. But does ultra-customizability really make things better for the person that’s trying to figure out what they want? Just because you can offer unbounded customization, does that mean you should? As the ability to offer customized products moves to the mainstream, will we really be making our customer’s life easier if we allow them un-bounded choices?
Sometimes the ramifications of a customization are pretty obvious. Being able to fit exactly between your fireplace and a door, and below a window, would certainly add value to a set of shelves, and can be quantified in just a few minutes by the average consumer with a tape measure. It’s kind of a binary decision…it will fit or it won’t.
In many cases it’s just too difficult or takes too long for a customer to understand the ramifications of making a decision on their own, with repercussions that aren’t quite so binary. What if you’re shorter than average and you think it would be a great idea to make your kitchen cabinets a couple of inches lower than the standard height. You’re getting a kitchen that’s “just right” for you and life is good. As soon as you start shopping for a dishwasher though you’ll understand why base cabinets are all pretty much the same height…dishwashers are all the same height. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s not the kind of surprise you’ll want in your new custom kitchen.
Much of this knowledge has to come from the designer’s or fabricator’s experience…the craftsman’s version of “local knowledge”. It may come from a textbook or have been explained by the foreman at your job, but more likely it comes from making mistakes…building a bookcase that’s too wide between supports so that the shelves sag, or a chair that’s uncomfortable to sit in because the angle of the back is wrong. And those kinds of problems are rarely obvious from a 3d model on a computer screen. You’ve got to experiment by cutting a prototype, cussing a little, and learning from your mistakes.
That’s not to say that there’s no room for outliers in design. When Chris Anderson talks about the Long Tail and Neil Gershenfeld refers to the “Market of One” in his book FAB, they are talking about designs that are hyper-customized for a very precise use case. If for instance you really want a giant table and chairs like these very cool ones designed by Marie Applegate and fabricated by a team including our friend Cindy Jian, then there are folks like Marie and Cindy that understand the challenges and issues that might come up and will be glad to work with you. If you want to design your own, CAD tools were created for just this use…letting you design anything you want and not have to stay “in the lines”.
An app or product customization that’s aimed at the average consumer however doesn’t need to allow customizing all the way to the tip of the long tail. You might find that your user will be so afraid of doing something wrong that they may just move sliders around and never actually make anything! Just because a slider in your program of app CAN go from 1 to 100 doesn’t necessarily mean it should…many times just going from 10–20 is all it needs!
One example of this kind of restraint is in Opendesk’s Tailoring system that allows customers to make changes to designs in just a few ways. As you look through the designs that can be tailored you’ll see that they all allow constrained customization is just a few appropriate ways. The customer knows that staying within the allowed modifications will give create a product that will be just what they want.
Your customer has “hired” your app to do a job…to make a product that fits their needs. They are counting on your experience to help them avoid bad decisions. If the impact of a change is obvious to the end user and clearly makes a better product I’m all for it, but we may find that even though we have the capability to allow limitless customization, limiting the number of decisions that a customer can make will deliver a better experience and ultimately a better product.
