Designerly Ways of Customising

Abstract

The aim of this research is to investigate the designerly nature of customisation from a design cognition perspective. Mass customisation is a business strategy that provides customers with personalised products with near mass production cost and efficiency. In this thesis, customisation is assessed as a situated design task for customers. The Function-Behaviour-Structure (FBS) ontology of design in combination with design conceptual spaces (i.e., problem space and solution space) is used to develop a taxonomical framework for different roles of customers. The proposed framework consists of five roles, namely, Requester, Composer, Codesigner, Remixer, and Prosumer. Each role constitutes a different type of situated designerly task for customers and demands different cognitive strategies from them. This framework builds a theoretical foundation for conducting empirical studies on customers from a design perspective. Protocol study is a well-established methodology for studying designers through their verbalisations. This research adopts a protocol-coding scheme based on the FBS ontology of design to code and analyse customisation protocols. A generic software tool is developed to facilitate the analysis of multiple protocols using FBS coding scheme. 18 protocols are recorded, coded and analysed in total, including 10 customisation protocols and 8 designing protocols. The participants are 20 undergraduate industrial design students split into 10 teams of two each. The performance of participants in customisation and designing protocols was compared in terms of the occurrence of the FBS design issues and processes. According to the results of testing hypotheses, a design problem-solving process is involved in customisation session. The style of participants in problem-solving is similar between customisation and design protocols. Furthermore, in both customisation and designing protocols, participants employ similar solution-focused strategies. The results of this research contribute to our understanding of customisation as a design problem-solving activity. In addition, it introduces a new generation of decision-makers, non-designers, to the field of design studies. Finally, it facilitates quantitative studies of designing by developing a generic software tool for efficient and reliable analysis of design protocols.