Looking at Platform Design

This post is proud to have been syndicated to the Ponoko Blog.

"The world is not ready for mass customization on a grand scale. Presented with the choice of ‘anything’, most people will be overwhelmed and simple draw a blank. To both educate and react to this reality, platform design give a basic starting point, a first step in moving to a mass customized world."

These are the words of Ken Oiling of Norwegian design house MELD. We reported on MELD last month as they announced their first product, a chair, launching this September at London Design Week. But as with any addition to the already swollen ranks of design methodologies, it is worth asking what Platform design actually means.

Oiling goes into some detail on the philosophy behind Platform design, billing it as a precursor to mass customisation proper. It will be interesting to see how this is actually translated into reality, but until then MELD give their three step process as follows:

1. Design a product for customization by both designers and users, allowing for maximum flexibility. The system must include manufacturing and logistics specifications, addressing sustainability and performance specifications.

2. Take this design/system and give it to other creatives to play and build with. Allow them to push the boundaries of the system and express themselves to their fullest. We believe this in turn will inspire the general population to use the system for their own visions.

3. Finally and most importantly; allow the final customization (regardless of designer) to be done by the buyer of the product. Allow them to decide the final expression or function of the product.

So it seems, the idea is that the originator does some initial design, passes it on to other designers to remix, using the technical skills and resources that they have on tap, before the product is customised by the end user. Its a good model for the current climate, where design tools are on the way to democratisation, but not pervasive enough to be used by every end user. So why not pass the design around those that you know can do something with it, before opening it up to the world, which might not know quite what to do with it!

image from meld.com

Great, As long as these tasty looking chairs don't just get snapped up by a whole lot of other collector/designers before they get a chance to thrive in the wider community - it also remains to be seen how the end user will be facilitated to "decide the final expression or function of the product" - Choice of paint schemes? Blank canvas? Cutting templates?

For more, Platformdesign.org is a website that Ken also contributes to that covers the Platform design and its practitioners in more detail. They have a well written article relating platform design to service design, which carries this choice nugget from 1960s philosopher, Marshal Mcluhan:

“As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of ‘do it yourself’.”

The parallels between the Platform method and service design are clear - it can really be seen as a contemporary way of relating industrial design with the values of user-centred service design. This is surely a good thing as for one, it gives new life to the activity of industrial design in service-centred economies, and secondly, it could hopefully help to repair the threatening gap between service design and industrial design.

Via Padraig.