Design for mass personalization

With pervasive connectivity of the Internet, personalization has become increasingly accepted for digital products. As opposed to customization, which emphasizes on meetings explicit requirements of defined market segments, personalization aims at effectively and efficiently satisfying individual needs. By considering customers as individuals, implicit characteristics such as personal taste, traits, innate needs and experience become important integral parts of product design. This new dimension for design opens up many new research issues. Design for mass personalization (DFMP) aims at effectively and efficiently satisfying customers as individuals by offering personally unique products with positive user experience. To this end, design is approached through the formulation of a product ecosystem based on a design platform and active customer participation. (C) 2010 CIRP.