Design Democracy: 6 Ways To Involve The End Consumer In The Process

Journalist and design critic Alice Rawsthorn, in her weekly column in the New York Times, says that designers should customize their work in such a way that it empowers the end consumer to participate in the design process.

Rawsthorn takes examples from the small inventions displayed at TechnoCRAFT, an exhibition that opened last week at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco:

One example is the system being developed by Local Motors, a car company in Arizona, to enable prospective customers to help design its cars online using open-source software. Another is the series of 100 chairs made in 100 days from remnants of old furniture by the Italian designer Martino Gamper. Then there are the “homemade” products improvised from found materials by the inmates of San Quentin State Prison in California, including chess sets made from toilet paper and a kettle from an electric plug and razor blade.

She believes that the TechnoCRAFT exhibition explores several ways by which people who would like to participate in the design process can do so:

One is “Crowdsourcing,” whereby design projects, like the Local Motors system, are determined by collective decisions. A second approach is for designers to create “Platforms,” or online tools with which consumers can customize individual products. They can also produce “Blueprints,” or formulas with which people can make objects themselves. The Swedish designer Per Brolund did this with the Joyride toy car, which can be assembled by children from modular parts and painted as they wish.

“Incompletes” are products that designers leave unfinished for their users to complete. While “Modules” are finished objects that can be combined in different ways. One is the Cloud series of interlocking panels, designed by the French brothers, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec for the Danish textile company, Kvadrat, to be made into screens and friezes of varying shapes and sizes.

Finally, guerrilla designers are transforming existing objects, whether they’re modernist icons, like Charles and Ray Eames’s chairs, or basic products such as bicycles, by “Hacking” them.

TechnoCRAFT

Alice Rawsthorn

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