Yesterday I was looking more in detail at a mass customization site, more in particular Propercloth. They sell custom shirts for men and what I found really interesting is how people can choose their size.

So after creating your own custom shirt, you’ll need to indicate your size. And sometimes this is a problem! But in this case you have three options for choosing your size.

The first one is just choosing the standard size (small, medium, large, …), the type of fit and two shirt dimensions (collar around and sleeve lenght).

Another possibility is giving in your body measurements and the system will give you the most approriate size.

The last way is choosing the sizing of a particular brand. This is very interesting since people often refer to a brand as their standard or reference. For example a lot of people don’t fit the clothes in the H&M since they known from former experience that a H&M-medium is the right one for them.

According to Sara Clemence, who wrote on the subject for Portfolio.com, mass customisation is our future way of shopping.

“Bespoke products have always been available to anyone willing and able to pay the price, whether for an individually tailored suit or a customized car. In recent years, one of the big shifts in retail has been giving customers the ability to design their own versions of premium products—like wedding rings, pricey handbags, and Nikes—at prices that are comparable to the regular versions.

Now, without most of us realizing it, we’re on the cusp of another big change. Thanks to market demands and developments in technology, we’re going to be living in a user-generated world, where everything we use can (and will) be customizable. It’s already happening, in ways both obvious and not.”

Some months ago one of my colleagues pointed me to a talk by the American psychologist Barry Schwartz. In his presentation “The Paradox of Choice” he focusses on one of the central elements of our Western Society, the freedom of choice. Common belief starts from the idea that we need a lot of choice to feel free. Schwartz argues that too much freedom will eventually make us “more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied”.

I’d like to link the concept of “too much choice” to an element my colleague Katrien stumbled upon. She found research which indicated that in the process of mass customization the concept of  mass confusion is likely to pop up. Mass confusion can be seen as the burden of all the effort, complexity and risk a customization process provokes.

In an article titled “Overcoming Mass Confusion: Collaborative Customer Co-Design in Online Communities “ a way to overcome mass confusion is co-designing: collaboratively working on a design would make it easier to overcome the stress of mass confusion.

In customisation process finding the right balance between (collective) guidance & individual freedom should thus be one of the key questions.

A while back, we talked about two website - Spoonflower and Bonbonkakku - which make it possible to design your own fabric. And since you have to try (almost) everything in life, we decided to check out the working of Spoonflower.

The first question was of course: which design? After some brainstorming we decided to make our business cards (which we still don’t have) out of fabric! Not only because we’re both part of an research project concerning clothes, but the choice for fabric is also related to the name of this blog: Social Textiles!

A second question concerned the amount of fabric we would order. But since this first time is just an experiment: we’ve chosen for a swatch (8×8 inch or 20,3 x 20,3 cm). If it all goes well, we can always order a whole yard for each business card!

With some essential help of Maarten, the designer, the business cards were ready for print! And from there on, I took over and frankly, it was a piece of cake! After registering, I just had to upload the TIF-file that Maarten already made! The next step was choosing the lay-out of the design: center, repeat, half-step, half-brick or mirror. I went for the option repeat and indicated that I wanted to order a swatch. So, these options are on the right side of your computer window and on the left side, you see your design with an indication of the size (kind of a ruler).

So far so good, but when I looked at the design the colours in the Spoonflower menu were different than the ones in the original TIF-file. However my attention was drawn to a title called  “preview color shift” in the left corner. This was a short, but clear text explaining that:

If you observe colors shifting in the preview: don’t worry. We print from your original file, not the preview.

So what’s up?: TIFF files and LAB colors won’t display in browsers, so to create this preview the Spoonflower elves have translated your original into a PNG file with RGB colors. Despite their care, color shift can occur.

This preview is created to give you a sense of the size and placement of your design in repeat.
When the elves prepare your file to print, they use a very fancy digital textile workstation that operates directly from your original file.
Most folks are really happy with the result, but if for any reason you aren’t, just let us know and we’ll reprint or refund your order.
Please keep in mind that colors on a computer monitor are not the same as colors printed on fabric, so if you’re sensitive about getting just the right color you’ll want to order a swatch first.
Unfortunately textile design and the web haven’t spent a lot of time together. As a matter of fact, we’ve only recently introduced them, but we hope the marriage will be long and fruitful! We’re working very hard to improve the accuracy of this preview. Apologies for any flaws.

So, I was reassured and went on with my order. I can say that I’m very anxious about the result. And as soon as that little piece of fabric arrives, I’ll let you know!

In this era of mass customisation and user-creation, very often questions are raised whether everyone can be a designer and if this doesn’t mean a loss of quality? A very famous critique is the one of Andrew Keen, who argues on a Fast company article that:

The consequence of this design democracy is an ugly spectacle of deep purples and electric oranges. It’s a culture of me-me-me: my hideously personalized car, my hideously personalized sofa, my hideously personalized house. It’s that fat woman in the tight dress that only exaggerates her obesity. It’s that loud pick-up truck with the tinted windows and the tastelessly sexualized exhaust pipe.

But according to Matt Sinclair on the Fluid Forms blog, the critique above isn’t about design, but about taste! And this opens a whole new debate: what is ‘good’ taste? According to him, the question of whether joe public can be designer, depends on how one defines design:

Professional designers think of it as a process which encompasses everything from consumer research and blue-sky concepting to the constraints imposed by manufacturing. Consumers tend to understand design as a noun, rather than a verb - something which is added to a product rather than something which fundamentally decides it.

New manufacturing technologies, and the companies which are giving consumers access to them, will not turn consumers into designers. But they will allow consumers to act creatively to interact with a product and make decisions about its form and function. For me, that’s better than just shopping.

Sometimes I wish I could use a sewing machine in a proper way! Unfortunately, even sewing on a button is a mission impossible!

After checking out Spoonflower,  I again felt the urge to learn some basic sewing tricks. Spoonflower is a website where you can design your own fabric. And although I can just design, order and buy my fabric … it isn’t enough, you have to do something with the fabric. But enough about my sewing disability. So Spoonflower offers custom digital textile printing. Everyone can upload an image, choose the arrangement (do you want your image being centered or repeated?) and have it printed on cotton. So if you just can’t find the right design for those new curtains, why not creating the pattern you’ve always wanted? And what’s more: every week, there’s the Fabric of the Week contest, in which the Spoonflowers decides which fabric they would like to buy. The winner of the contest not only gets 5 yards of the fabric for free, but his or her design will also be offered for sale in the Spoonflower Etsy Shop, for one week.

Another similar site is Bonbonkakku. This Finnish site is for fabric, what Threadless is for T-shirts. The basic principle in both sites is the competition, only the subject is different. In the case of Bonbonkakku, every fabric designed will be published on the site for viewers to see and vote on. The fabrics that get the most votes are chosen to be sold on the Bonbonkakku site. So anyone can upload and submit a fabric design to the competition and if the design gets selected, the winner gets a  heap of fabric, with his/her design on it. Furthermore the winning design  will also be sold on the site.

I think it’s time, I’m taking a sewing class!

Source: Spoonflower, Bonbonkakku