Simon Wardley asks (and answers) the question:
Why would consumers want mass customisation. The answer to that is probably because that they’ve been primed to want it. In order to limit the commoditisation of physical products, advertisers have been pushing the concept of “designed for you” to the public for the past twenty years. The bewildering array of choice in many products is designed not only to engage the consumer in the product but also to make comparison between products more difficult. I suspect that consumers have become comfortable with the concepts of customisation.
We agree with his analysis; people are indeed primed for this. Consider whether people were ready for personal 2D printing? Prior to “real” 2D printers, people made 2D artifacts manually, by drawing on paper. Today people make their 3D objects manually, by nailing stuff together. Yes, they’ll take to 3D printing easily enough.
Via Bits or Pieces
