Design challenges for implementing a customer driven mass-customisation system

The trend towards highly customised products and services creates challenges in that as products become ever more individualised the customer will start to become the product designer and will need to be able to deal with the challenges that a professional product designer has to address. A novice, non-designer, customer will know how they want their product to look but may be unaware of the engineering and production limitations that will prevent them from realising their desire. This presents massive problems when reconciling the desires and needs of the customer with the need to achieve mass-production levels of efficiency. This paper examines the challenges that must be overcome in order to enable consumers to actively participate in the design of customised products and proposes a potential system to do this.