Design for mass personalization in digital manufacturing context

Diversifying customer needs and fierce mass-market competition drive the industry to seek new solutions. The advancements in digital manufacturing enable Mass Personalization (MP) to answer individual customer needs. Design for Mass Personalization (DfMP) envisages profound product variability with active customer participation to answer specific needs efficiently. Conventional design methodologies lack in designing for such product variability and customer involvement that can answer specific needs. Addressing the lack of design methods in DfMP to exploit digital manufacturing, this thesis presents a design methodology for MP, focusing on the utilization of manufacturing flexibility in developing personalizable products and eliciting customers' specific needs through effective customer participation. The presented methodology proposes a flexible and adaptable seed design architecture, and an interactive customer co-creation process. Proposed DfMP framework structures a design process where the designer facilitates customer co-creation over a modifiable seed design. A two-phase process guides the designer through the development of a user-modifiable design and demonstrates how to facilitate user involvement in reaching personalized designs. The development of seed design, construction of design space, and management of solution space with a design solution algorithm are elaborated. The methodology is verified through two case studies and an industrial application example. The first case study includes the functional, ergonomic, and esthetical personalization of a shoe that is manufactured by 3D printing and digital knitting. The study is supported by interviews with experts to evaluate the design process and content of the study. The potential of the DfMP methodology is largely confirmed by the experts. The second case study demonstrates the functional personalization of a saxophone mouthpiece to tailor the performance for musicians. The findings are verified through a user study with saxophone players. The proposed co-creation scenario is successfully tested with players, and the ability of the methodology to cater to their specific needs is demonstrated. Both case studies show the potential of the methodology to deal with coupled MP cases and provide for personal needs. Finally, an application on FARO dental lights is exampled to illustrate the use in a practical setting of a commercial product. The outcome of this research contributes to DfMP to exploit the flexibility that emerging digital manufacturing technologies provide to enable meeting diverse customer needs efficiently and effectively. A systematic approach to DfMP will allow expanding MP to more products and act as a foundation for the customer co-creation oriented design in the context of this emerging paradigm.

Publication year:2022

Keywords:Doctoral thesis

Accessibility:Open