Democratization of Design

I spend the last weekend in Munich for the Volvo Sports Design Forum which the main theme was Personal Design. The forum showed different examples of how companies try to involve users in the making of there products. I was kind of disappointed that the examples showed are represent still a very superficial way of customization like letting the user change the colors of a specified number of modular pieces in a product (example: NIKE ID). But I would say…we want more than that!

One thing is certain about personalization of products:

once brands give users freedom to influence in design decisions that are deeper than changing the colors of their shoe laces, they risk losing brand identity which no big company is willing to do.

And at the forum nobody mentioned projects like Instructables, a plattform that let users submit instructions for problems….now that’s for me much more personal. Ok, I must say that it is also not really Design (or is it?). I think something is missing out there, maybe we are going to see the emergence of new kinds of Brands, who knows.
While in Munich I got to meet Sebastian Schulz, a friend from the HfG Offenbach Design School , which is currently doing an internship at BMW in Munich. We talked a little bit about innovation networks and their potential to guide companies through changes in user needs and to serve as a co-design platform for products to be designed by companies and users. He is preparing himself for a graduation project in this subject. He also showed me this amazing video about the web 2.0 dynamic content capabilities which made my mind snap.

Maybe this “hypertext culture” can actually transform our way of coming up to solutions for real-life design problems. Look at Wikipedia and its interrelationships of ideas that constantly Grow and are modified by users in real time….could we think of something like Wikipedia outside of the software world? a branded instructables? I just want to live to see what happens.

Link to Video