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.

Everybody knows Threadless: where you can buy T-shirts that gained enough votes from Threadless-members. But Yerzies is different; it prints, stiches and presses every design on a T-shirt or other garment. Although they started with a competition model, this was rejected by the community.
So if you’re the only on that likes the shirt, you’re sure that it can be produced at Yerzies!

In times of mass customisation, children aren’t forgotten. Creashirt offers them – Crea Kit – a package that contains a T-shirt with an original drawing and a set of felt-pens.

Children can colour the drawing in accordance with their own taste or mood and create in this way an unique creation, that will generate some jealousy on the playground.

Mass customisation … the buzz word … everybody knows what it means and can instantly name 10 to 20 examples of companies that provide their products with mass customisation options.

But how does the production of those mass customized products work …. how do the underlying technologies funtions? On the blog of Joseph Flaherty - founder of Replicator, Inc, a company that manufactures and sells custom consumer products – all technologies that enable personal fabrication are explained.

Everything you always wanted to know about 3D printing, Laser Cutters, Waterjet Cutters, 2D Plotter Cutters, Print on Demand, Direct To Garment Printing, CNC Milling, CNC Embroidery, Cut & Sew Construction, 3D Scanning is explained with small video contributions in his post: ‘Personal fabrication for dummies’.