Wooden Astronauts, American Muscle, and a Pessimistic Scribe

by Joseph Flaherty on October 13, 2009

Smashing Magazine finds emergent trends in iPhone app UI design. One major one is faux materiality as embodied by these apps. Though our lives are rapidly and increasingly being mediated by screens human psychology is still framed by physical affordances and attachment to the material world.

Ford is advertising the 2010 Mustang to car enthusiasts via customization. They have a slick looking, horribly functioning website (all Flash) that allows you to create the car of your dreams. It works nicely for creating desktops, but there is no clear distinction between really factory options and fantasy tools. Hopefully they will follow MINI’s lead and start enabling true customization at point of sale.

A German website is featuring wooden cutting boards that have laser cut imagery integrated into the wood grain. See the skier on the left carving up the mahogany mogul. These are much like the bags made by Freitag that created a customized offering by marrying a standard manufacturing process with a constantly changing raw material.

Icon Magazine has a lengthy essay on fabrication on their website. It is common information if you follow the space, but it collects a number of threads in one article. In a refreshing turn it also highlights the obstacles to a mass customized utopia. For example, this quote from Bruce Sterling:

“People just don’t have the extra time in their day or the emotional energy for design,” says science fiction writer and design commentator Bruce Sterling. “It’s like saying people are going to make their own films. You get these odd mash ups on YouTube, and some of them are quite fun but it’s not design.”

I think Bruce is right to a point. Does the average person want to customize their fridge? Probably not, but in higher touch, emotional product categories there is already strong demand. Take scrapbooking, a $3B hobby market that is driven by the purchase of “Paper, Glitter, and Crap” as noted by an industry leader. People are already creating be it with a CriCut personal paper cutter or building something with plans from Instructables.