3D printing & Individualization: Why I don”t want to be in your shoes.
Personalization is just putting your name on something at Zazzle. Customization is making a few choices to get an approximation of what you want. This is just like what you can do now with a car configurator on any car website. Many things can and will be customized and personalized. But, both these things can (at least partially) be done with regular mass manufacturing technology. With Individualization you need new technology, such as 3D printing or old technology such as artisanship. Individualized products and individualized production go beyond mass manufacturing towards a new kind of paradigm for products and services. With individualization not only will your shoes not fit me but I wouldn”t want to wear them anyhow.
Here is the dictionary definition of Individualized: Â “to make individual in character; to treat or notice individually : particularize ; to adapt to the needs or special circumstances of an individual <individualize teaching according to student ability>”
A truly individualized thing is something that is per definition suited only for one single individual.
Most shoes only come in 13 different sizes. People broadly fit into one shoe size and this size kind of fits them. This is the “tyranny of mass production”: cheap products that need expensive marketing to sell them to the largest identifiable group. With mass production technology making you believe you’re buying the right product is easier than making the right product for you. The 13 shoe sizes as engineered by shoe manufacturers are not supposed to fit you well, they’re supposed to “kind of” fit 1/13th of the population.
There’s this joke (and a commercial) of two people sitting in the jungle as a tiger approaches. One hurriedly puts on his running shoes. The other says, “why are you putting on the shoes? You can’t outrun a tiger.” The other replies, “I don’t have to outrun a tiger, I only have to outrun you.” This is the state of mass manufacturing today. No one is able to make the “best product for you” because everything they make has to have millions of copies. They just want to be marginally better than the other guy at making and selling these copies at a profit. Mass production will only make things good enough for the large groups of people it can identify and cater to. Within the mass production paradigm low unit cost, scale, scope and throughput will always be key drivers. Because of this mass production is per definition incapable of producing the “best product for you” in any category.
Jeremy Clarkson once said of a 7 series BMW, “it looks like it was designed by a committee to offend the least amount of people.” Actually, our world is designed according to this maxim. Â And yes there are shirts and brands that you don’t like. But these are simply designed for another target group of millions of other people. Â Or maybe it’s a voice in your head screaming out at the mass manufactured detritus that makes up our world.
James Taylor & Son, and other high end cobblers are different. They painstakingly make high end shoes that are fit for one single foot. The shoes are measured and measured again so that each fits one of your two feet. These truly individualized things are all unique, no two are the same. These handmade shoes are expensive but fit you like a dream. This is because they are made for you and for you alone.
But, how well would your individualized shoes fit me? Probably quite poorly. Whereas I could probably easily wear a pair of your Nike’s, Â your James Taylor’s would probably not even close properly around my foot and be very uncomfortable.
The better an individualized product fits you the worse it’ll fit another person.
And how about the styling? Lancia is an Italian brand that has as a its ace in the hole the beauty of its cars. A number of years ago Lancia let owners choose from a million different car colors. People happily jumped in and the result was a lot of hideous pink & purple cars.
The level of individualized styling a product has is inversely proportional to how many people will find  the product beautiful.
We can already see the results of this. Puma’s Mongolian Shoe Bar B Q and Nike ID let people customize the styling of their shoes. These products are not individualized your styling choices are limited and you cannot change what matters most: the fit of the shoe. But, many shoes that emerge from these configurators are rather obviously ugly. If you give people the freedom to change things, they will initially plum for the obviously noticeable and obviously different. This also explains people’s obsession with the building of and tearing down of statues and signs in times of political change.
Individualized products and individualized production will let you create products as you want them to be. Individualization will make things that better suit your needs & fit you better. Not everything will be individualized and things such as mass production and mass brands will continue to exist. But, the form and functionality of the things we cherish will diverge from each other. Increasingly you won”t fit my shoes and won”t want to wear them anyway.
Tl;dr
A truly individualized thing is something that is per definition suited only for one single individual.
The better an individualized product fits you the worse it’ll fit another person.
The level of individualized styling a product has is inversely proportional to how many people will find  the product beautiful.
Images are Creative Commons Attribution from Johnathansin, Johnathansin, Johnathansin & Johnathansin, Yes, they”re all designed by the same person!
