Transition to Digital Manufacturing. Generating product opportunities with authentically ‘post-series’ design

Digital technologies today promote a shift in manufacturing and distribution, implying a shift in the range of possibilities available to design practitioners. After mass customisation in resourceful industries, new digital manufacturing tools allows even micro-enterprises to offer personalisable products: a technical transition that raise interesting opportunities for the Design profession, always interested in finding novel ways of satisfying user needs and desires. Product personalisation can be advantageous in numerous product categories, and our case studies led to a conceptual framework for assessing the user motivations that underpin personalisable products. The paper shows how the critical evaluation of best practices was turned into a design method to be practiced through a design tool: a canvas that facilitates ideating personalisable product designs. The tool was tested in a didactic setting, where it helped the challenging task of integrating the creative contributions of the user/co-creator as design material. Parametric Design can act as a design partner, which continuously re-shapes the product design, even in distant places or times – thus changing the nature of participation. This enables an “on-demand” material culture, with an increasing sensibility to individual needs and desires, promising to establish a deeper connection between user and artefact by constructing novel personal narratives.