CIRP Annals - Manufacturing Technology 59 (2010) 175–178

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CIRP Annals - Manufacturing Technology

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Design for mass personalization

M.M. Tseng (1)a,*, R.J. Jiao b, C. Wang a
a
Advanced Manufacturing Institute, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong
b
The G.W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0405, USA

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: With pervasive connectivity of the Internet, personalization has become increasingly accepted for digital
Design
products. As opposed to customization, which emphasizes on meetings explicit requirements of defined
Product development
market segments, personalization aims at effectively and efficiently satisfying individual needs. By
Personalization
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.
ß 2010 CIRP.

1. Introduction
With the growing attention to increase the value added in
manufacturing, mass customization (MC) has attracted much
attention as a major strategic initiative from academia and
industry [1]. The prevailing practice of customization is to identify
patterns of customer needs with families of products, along with
common building blocks of components, subassemblies, and
modules with product fulfilment processes. Thus, various elements
of design and manufacturing can be reused to match customer
needs with product variety [2,3]. MC has managed to serve
businesses with market niches, but still not to reach the extent of
market-of-one which has been envisioned as a potential driving
force for the next transformation of global economy [4].
In information systems, personalized user interface has been
popular by using implicit data captured in user interactions. In
essence, personalization is achieved through eliciting customer
inherent needs based on one-to-one interactions with the
customer. The rapid emergence of Web technologies with expert
systems techniques has enabled market-of-one strategy in online
sale and e-service [5]. For example, Amazon.com can recommend
customers to source books or products that they have not heard of
based on their profiles and purchase histories. It provides
customers with unique purchase experience and personalized
product offerings beyond expectation. Will this be possible in new
design technology? Can product development team anticipate and
adapt to customers’ latent needs? Can customers be delighted as
individuals as suggested by the Kano model [6]? Can personaliza-
tion be carried out with efficiency?
To begin with, the conventional survey or interview often fails
to reveal latent customer needs. Furthermore, customers can be
reluctant to reveal their inner needs, which may not be known by
* Corresponding author.
customers themselves either. Then current product life cycle from
product conception, delivery, usage, service, thru end of life
disposal has not been able to consider customers as individuals. It
is apparent that not only designers but also customers play crucial
roles in expanding the scope of design from customization to
personalization. Towards this end, design for mass personalization
(DFMP) aims at effectively and efficiently satisfying customers as
individuals by offering personally unique products with positive
user experience.
2. Personalization and design
Personalization is to achieve satisfying each customer as an
individual. Thus, product differentiation is at individual customer
level, as opposed to customization which differentiates products
for market segments. The idea of deriving profitability from, and
gaining competitive edges through, differentiating products is not
new. It often appears as market segmentation, customer-centric, or
augmented cognition to exemplify personalization. In terms of
design, personalization discerns from customization mainly in two
dimensions, expanding product design space, and embracing
intangible customer experience.
2.1. Product design space
In customization, customers are classified into different market
segments based on different known customer needs identified by
marking analysis. The customers grouped in the same market
segment receive similar or parameter-based customized products
from a pre-defined product family. The configuration mechanism,
product architectures, basic modules and critical parameters have
been kept stable within the pre-defined realm of configuration. As
a matter of fact, the essence of design for mass customization
(DFMC) is to configure various product variants through mod-
ularity with the commonality embedded in product platforms so as

0007-8506/$ – see front matter ß 2010 CIRP.

doi:10.1016/j.cirp.2010.03.097
176 M.M. Tseng et al. / CIRP Annals - Manufacturing Technology 59 (2010) 175–178
to reuse proven design among product families [2]. On the other
hand, in DFMP, customers work with providers to create objects
that may be totally new to fulfil customer needs as long as budget
and schedule permit.
Personalization goes beyond configuration-to-order product
lines and needs to explore market potential by leveraging product
functionality with the realization of affective and cognitive needs,
hence enabling product differentiation beyond the original set of
product offerings. While customization assumes fixed product
architectures and pre-defined configuration models, personaliza-
tion implies possible changes of the basic design and product
features. The adaptability and changeability of product designs
becomes essential for personalization.
Both customization and personalization involve changes of
product design to meet the customer needs. In customization,
individual customers make their selection base on ‘the menu’
which consists mainly of a collection of known (and proven)
components, modules and subsystems with given logic to
configure finished products. Computer configuration is an
excellent example here. Computer manufacturers predict in
advance the potential ranges of products that customers would
like to purchase. Producers then determine the common denomi-
nators to find the best set of building blocks for customers to mix
and match to get to their needs. In personalization, the final
outcome of product design is much less predictable. Customers
and manufacturers may be able to foresee to products that will
satisfy the needs of customers within the capability of producers to
deliver. It could include discovery of latent customer needs based
on customer profile, interactive behavior patterns, and other
pertinent information which reflect the cultural background,
personal likings, personal tastes and aesthetics preferences. These
are factors that can substantially differentiate from others.
2.2. Customer experience
The most significant extension of personalization can be
attributed to the inclusion of experience not only in usage, but
also buying, order processing, delivery, installation, repair,
maintenance, and disposal. Besides products’ functional perfor-
mance, the experience of customers through these stages is a vital
part of customer satisfaction as well. The progression of the value-
added, extending beyond physical resource intensive functional
components to intangible customer personal feelings has been
widely reported in many industries from automobile, appliances,
computer products to telecommunication [7].
Customer experience is usually latent and difficult to exploit
through marketing analysis. It originates from evolution of the
user’s affective states triggered by stimuli (events) along with a
chain of cognitive tasks. The scope of design methodology
traditionally focused on physical products. It starts with customer
needs in physical space and with emphasis on functional
performance related requirements. Customization is in no excep-
tion. A common example in customization, configuring computers
mostly deals with selection of disk drives, CPU power, memory,
and other peripherals. It seldom involves the affective and
cognitive factors that constitute the interactions with ambience,
particularly in cases that involve a collection of products (objects)
and human users. On the other hand, personalization has to deal
with the affective, cognitive and functional requirements con-
currently. In order to ensure positive customer experience,
personalization has to go beyond the confines of physical products;
it should also include intangible aspects such as services, aesthetics
and other cognitive aspects that induce the total experience.
Customer experience realization is based on product’s functional
performance, so that cognitive and affective needs elicitations can
also lead to identification of unexpected performance related
requirements. Desired customer experience can be further
improved by satisfying those unexpected requirements. Thus,
functional performance related design requirements and customer
experience related requirements are positively correlated.
3. Design for mass personalization
In order to include user experience in unknown design space,
design for mass personalization (DFMP) needs to synthesize the
experience into the innovative process of design and carry it out
with efficiency. DFMP includes product ecosystem as the kernel,
design framework as the design context and customer co-creation
to drive the process. They are described in the following sections.
3.1. Product ecosystem
The inter-twined relationships among objects in modern day
life are inherent and complementary. The products are no longer
islands of their own to fulfil self-contained isolated functionality.
Everything from digital cameras, media players, car accessories,
mobile phones, and even clothing and running shoes, have an
important interdependence with broader user related character-
istics (comparing with functional performance related compo-
nents of the product) that are related to customer participations. As
customers become more connected, products and services are
increasingly knitted to a larger ecosystem of interacting objects.
The product is not an isolated incidence, it should be considered as
a part of ecosystems. Looking at the whole sum of interacting
objects and understanding the flow patterns and directions, they
are essential to delight customers with personalization.
Therefore, DFMP assumes an ecosystem thinking of product
innovation and service operations with the underpinning business
models that enable the sustainability of providers and customers
relationship. A product ecosystem can be specified as functional
performance related design requirements with the support of
foundation technical and business system, along with customer
related interface. The premise of DFMP is the formulation of a
product ecosystem perspective of the product.
Thus, the product ecosystem in personalization can be viewed
as three tiers, core infrastructure, hard components, and soft
characteristics. Differing from conventional design focused only on
the tangible set of features, DFMP needs to take these three tiers
into consideration simultaneously in order to invoke active
customer participation and enhance customer experience.
(1) The core infrastructure is the foundation of a product. It is
similar to the product family architecture (PFA) for a product
platform in mass customization. The core infrastructure goes
beyond the technical architecture of the product ecosystems, it
also include business models that provide fair rewards and
motivate contribution among all participating parties. To
ensure the effectiveness and efficiency of ecosystems, the
stability of core infrastructure is important.
(2) The hard components consist of tangible physical elements
that can be customized through configuration and aggregation.
These components are changeable to meet physical functional
requirements.
(3) The soft characteristics address customer experience from
human–product–ambience interactions. They may include not
only the software part of products, but also user interaction,
service process, aesthetics outlook, touch and feel of products.
Soft characteristics are often easier to modify and thus easy to
enhance the value for personalization.
3.2. DFMP technical framework
DFMP calls for extensive coordination among many disciplinary
and functional groups. In general, it goes beyond the traditional
territory of product design and involves more front-end business
and marketing issues. At the backend, the DF’X’ mindset is
extended to take into account downstream production and
logistics concerns in the front-end design. Such a complex
engineered system requires systematic management throughout
design decision making. Fig. 1 illustrates the decision framework of
DFMP along the entire spectrum of product realization. In a holistic
 M.M. Tseng et al. / CIRP Annals - Manufacturing Technology 59 (2010) 175–178
Fig. 1. DFMP technical framework.
view, DFMP encompasses five domains, namely the customer,
functional, physical, process and logistics domains. Design for
personalization involves a series of ‘‘what-how’’ mappings
between these domains.
3.2.1. Product planning
The customer domain is characterized by a set of customer
needs (CNs) that are generally categorized as known CNs, which
are usually functional performance related customer needs and
latent CNs, which are difficult to obtain through marketing
analysis. Latent CNs include user experience related needs and
unknown performance related needs. The CNs are translated into
functional requirements (FRs) in the functional domain, in which
the specification of a product ecosystem is formulated by taking
into account customer and engineering concerns. Hard and soft FRs
are identified with available core infrastructure, product technol-
ogies and marketing support. Hard FRs are designed to be
customizable through configuration, whereas soft FRs are to be
fulfilled by personalization of customer-unique value chains based
on changeable, adaptable and reconfigurable service and delivery
processes.
The mapping between the customer and functional domains
constitutes the front-end issues associated with personalization.
Such a planning task always starts with existing product portfolio
and conforms to those common practices of order configuration
and sales force automation. The exploration of soft FRs involves
intensive customer interactions. Customer participations are
necessary to elicit latent customer needs. User innovation toolkits,
data mining and Web learning lend themselves to be the main
techniques of customer requirement acquisition and reasoning
about user experience [8,9].
3.2.2. Product and value chain platforms
Personalization solutions are generated in the physical domain
by mapping FRs to design parameters (DPs) based on the shared
product and value chain platforms. The fulfillment of hard FRs
involves typical decisions regarding product family design and
configuration. For personalization of soft characteristics, custo-
mer-unique value chains must be designed in such a way that
customer participation within a product ecosystem can be
separated into a series of value-generating activities, in which
customer experience is recorded and analyzed. Usability study is
always useful to design changeable and adaptable work flows that
enable customer co-creation and accommodate development of
latent customer needs. Also concerned should be cost advantages
of personalized value chains. Similar to the wisdom of reusing
proven design elements, formulating common value chain plat-
forms is deemed to be an effective means to achieve mass
production efficiency. New cyber-physical platforms, such as Web
2.0, cloud computing, P2P and SecondLife, offer great potential for
177
implementing value chain platforms into online personalization
engines that can provide recommendations on latent CNs [10].
3.2.3. Process and service platforms
The back-end issues associated with personalization involve
the process and logistics domains, which are characterized by
process variables (PVs) and logistics variables (LVs), respectively.
The mappings from DPs to PVs and to LVs entail process design and
supply chain planning. The main concern of process design is to
take advantage of existing capabilities and utilize repetitions in
production planning. The process view of personalization is
enacted as service delivery processes. Identification of changeable,
adaptable and reconfigurable processes and formulation process
platforms are deemed to be the fundamental issues of process
reuse [11]. Likewise, in the logistics domain, the economic
fulfilment of personalization relies on changeable, adaptable and
reconfigurable supply and delivery networks [3].
3.3. Active customer participation
Customization suffices with a process of customers’ making
choices passively from pre-defined offerings. Based on these
choices, firms can then gear up supply chains, production process
to fulfil the orders with little or even no customer participations. In
cases where customer choices are based on a set of objective
parameters, for example, engineering machine designs, customer
participations increase little value. However, for personalization,
active customer participation in the design process impacts not
only in eliciting innate requirements but also total quality of a
product.
Furthermore, customer co-creation process and design of
human–product interactions, two major design tools commonly
used in personalization, often require active customer participa-
tion. Obviously, active customer participation is also crucial to
satisfy user experience related requirements, because experience
is created through a chain of human cognitive activities. Therefore,
active customer participation is an important design driver for the
whole process, which directly influences the final product offering
in personalization.
4. Illustrative example
Living space design accordance with its end users’ personal
tastes and preferences presents a typical case of personalization. A
living room involves customers’ affective, cognitive and functional
requirements, along with many objects inside the room. Custo-
mers’ interacting with the room ambience constitutes a product
ecosystem. In this design case, hard FRs refer to the technical
specifications of room design like square-feet of the room and
types of the objects that a particular customer prefers to. The hard
178 M.M. Tseng et al. / CIRP Annals - Manufacturing Technology 59 (2010) 175–178
Fig. 2. A living room design ecosystem.
FRs can be easily customized using a configurator, which basically
visualizes various combinations of pre-defined DPs and prompts
the customer to select one of them. For example, there are quite a
few space planning software available from stores like Home Depot
and Lowe’s.
What really deserves personalization is regarding those soft FRs
related to customer perception (affective needs, e.g., feel cosy) and
serviceability (cognitive tasks, e.g., entertain guests), which
require customers’ participations to identify. Fig. 2 shows a
screenshot of a prototype virtual personalization system devel-
oped in SecondLife [12]. The customer is represented by an avatar
who is invited to ‘walk through’ different room plans and change
the design on his own using the toolkit built into the virtual
environment. The toolkit is an open source library of living room
objects, which keeps updated and accumulated from user inputs.
For each testing scenario, the objects in the room ambience are
tagged, such that the avatar’s interaction with each object during
the walking through can be recorded and tracked for the
personalization engine to analyze and extract the patterns of
usability and preferences, and in turn to recommend personalized
room design. In this case, a foldable sleeper sofa is recommended
for his design, as the engine manages to reveal his latent need for
accommodating his guests in the living room. The customer thus
becomes delighted as design can adapt to his unexpected need.
In this case, the key of personalization is context awareness,
namely relevance to customer latent needs. At the backend of the
prototype system, a case-driven personalization engine is devel-
oped based on the case-based reasoning paradigm. Recommenda-
tions are composed with reference to a priori case examples. The
rough set theory [13] is applied to formulate user activity models
by recognizing typical living room activities from recorded
histories of avatars’ interactions with the tagged objects embedded
in the virtual environment. The K-optimal rule discovery technique
is employed to identify underlying mapping relationships from
soft FRs to design elements. Based on conjoint analysis of soft FRs, a
weighted ordinal logistic regression model is developed as a
benchmark to evaluate the quality of each recommendation. For
example, Fig. 2 also shows a result of evaluating association rules
for latent need ‘feel up-scaled’, in which seat material is found as
the most significant factor for this particular association according
to the significance value of weighted ordinal logistic regression.
Before making a design decision, this recommendation still need to
be further analyzed and optimized in terms of shared-surplus
formulation consisting of both customer satisfaction and producer
capacity.
5. Conclusion
Personalization is envisioned as one of the major drivers for the
next transformation of the global economy. As opposed to
customization which emphasizes on design for market segments,
personalization considers each customer as an individual and
explores customer’s innate preference and implicit needs. It often
yields a holistic solution with product and experience that are
better than their expectation within budget and schedule. Design is
the key to realize mass personalization. Successful DFMP includes
product ecosystem as kernel, a technical design framework as the
design context and customer co-creation to drive the process.
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