How much is too much choice!

If you’ve been following along you know that I’ve been interested in digital fabrication’s ability to make customized items, particularly furniture. Something that’s created specifically for the customer. But just being interested in something doesn’t always lead you toward any great insights…there needs to be some “design doing” along with “design thinking”.

I had been doing this stuff long enough so knew I could figure out a method to fabricate custom items to fit a person’s needs, but would anyone care? Were the unwashed masses waiting for someone to make a chair that was just for them? The only way to find out is to give it a shot and do a test.

Shelving was my first thought…it’s ideal for customization. You know the stuff you need to put on shelves, and you know the space you have to fill. All you need is a tape measure, or maybe just a yardstick. A better test though were chairs. Making a chair that was “just right” for you.

The two things I needed to test if there was an interest were a way for people to quantify what their perfect chair would be, and a simple design that could be easily modified to fit their specs.

The first step was to make an adjustable chair that people could sit in and find their “perfect” seat height. It looked like some kind of torture device but adjusted from 15" seat height through 21" height in 1/8" increments.

The design for the chair was equally simple. Something slab-y that would be easy to modify by moving the slots for the seat up or down.

I started testing on everyone that came in the shop. It would start somewhere in the middle of the range, let someone sit in it, and then ask if it was too high or too low. Then I would adjust it up or down until they said it was “just right”. That was the theory at least, but it didn’t turn out that way.

The majority said it was “just fine” wherever it happened to be when they started. I asked if they would like it higher or lower, and they said it felt good just where it was.

There were some folks that really got into the idea of having a chair that was customized just for them, and would keep trying different heights until they found what they said was perfect for them. The funny part though was that I could move the seat when they weren’t around, and ask them to confirm that it was the perfect height. And nobody could tell that it was different. It was still “just right”

I was kind of disappointed by how little interest there was in having what was basically a prescription chair, but did enjoy playing with different chair designs and options. My favorite by far was one I named the “Heart Attack Chair”

You know that feeling when you’re sitting in a chair and start to lean back. It really feels good until you reach the point when all of a sudden it feels like it’s about to tip over backwards! The Heart Attack Chair is pretty much binary and goes straight from sitting normally to feeling like it’s going to tip over! Even when you KNOW it’s not going to flip you over backwards, it still give you the brief feeling of panic!

I don’t claim in any way that this was a scientific study, and it may just be that I just have weird people come into my shop, but it definitely dampened my interest in customized chairs. My instinct is that people were so used to buying chairs based on style instead of size that they weren’t able to wrap their heads around being able to make such granular size choices. Maybe if I had offered just a limited number of sizes to try instead of such small variations like James McBennett’s stools , the outcome would have been different?