In Pursuit of Personalization Design

In response to diversified needs in the market, the manufacturing industry is required to provide more user-oriented products and services than ever. In order to satisfy such needs, much attention has been paid to personalization, which, in this paper, refers to the process of designing, manufacturing, and providing different products and services for each individual user. There are key enablers to foster personalization because of technological advancement. Since personalization is considered an approach to prolonging the value lifetime of a product and minimizing resource input, it should be further discussed in the field of lifecycle engineering. To realize personalization, a methodology to design such products is essential. We call such design as “Personalization design.” The goal of this research is to develop a theory for personalized design. In this paper, we propose the concept of personalization in the context of product and service design including a life cycle perspective. We firstly show examples of personalization and their characteristics as context, target phase and participation. This is followed by a presentation of the concept of personalization. Then, we show how the actual personalized design system was designed through a case study on designing equipment for rehabilitation hospital. In this case, participation of multi-stakeholder has a great influence on a design solution. Finally, we discuss the future direction of design research for personalization.