Viktor Malakuczi
The contemporary material culture—everyday objects surrounding us—is dominated by massmanufactured products, but Digital Fabrication together with Computational Design (also calledgenerative or parametric design) promises a shift towards substantially personalizable products, in arelatively cost-effective way. Considering this shift an opportunity for designers, the book argues that inorder to consolidate the practice of developing personalizable products, designers need to change theirfocus from convergent to divergent user needs and desires, leaving room for the creative contributionsof the users in the design of their objects, thus converting them from simple users to (computational)co-designers. Albeit such “on-demand” products are still rare in the everyday environment, thereare numerous appreciable examples, which led to the recognition of six recurring personalizationprinciples—or user motivations—of both mechanical and cognitive nature. Based on these, the bookproposes a design approach the systematic replicating the observed principles on any product typology,with the support of a new design tool: a canvas that guides the designer’s thinking towards productconcepts to which personalization is essential. The proposed tool might help designers to spreadpersonalisable design across many product categories, thus creating new business opportunitiescoherently with the recent development of the Industry 4.0 paradigm. On the long term, this mightpromote a more active role of the user in shaping the material culture, both through improvingfunctionality and through new ways of creating meaning.
