Custom furniture maker Context Furniture has launched a new website called Design Democracy ’08 – Power to the People, which they describe as a grass roots event aimed at raiseing awareness about mass customization.
This website offers curriculum for DD08 ‘citizens’ (members) to learn about mass customization processes, philosophies, materials, design elements and software/hardware applications.  Most [...]

I would very much have liked to attend the MCPC (Mass Customization and Personalization Conference) 2007 , which was held recently in MIT, Boston and HEC Montreal, however I was unable to do so due to other commitments.
Therefore, I’m making a small contribution to the MCPC 2007 by gathering the thoughts of some of those [...]

CreateSpace, part of the Amazon.com, has recently announced a new online Books on Demand service.
CreateSpace was originally founded as CustomFlix Labs, Inc. in 2002 and acquired by Amazon.com Inc. in 2005. Prior to launching the Books on Demand service, CreateSpace was already providing inventory-free, physical distribution of CDs and DVDs on Demand, and video [...]

An interesting idea recently covered by Springwise is custom blended teas. Blends For Friends is a British company that sells custom-blended teas, mainly ordered as gifts. The buyer is asked to provide some information about the chosen recipient, although only some basic details are obligatory. However, there are many more optional pieces of information [...]

Frank Piller has posted an announcement regarding the 2007 World Conference on Mass Customization and Personalization.
Keynote speakers include B. Joseph Pine (who wrote the book ‘Mass Customization - The New Frontier in Business Competition’ in 1993, which can be said to have kick started the whole area of mass customization), Eric Von Hippel of the [...]

Back in November 2006, I speculated as to the type of businesses which might emerge using a hybrid of mass customization, crowdsourcing, micro manufacturing and online factory business models. One such hybrid has emerged recently in New Zealand. Ponoko describes itself as the world’s first personal manufacturing platform where anyone can click to [...]

Business Week’s SmallBiz section carries a feature on five small businesses that have implemented mass customization. The five are American Art Resources, Chip-N-Dough, Zyrra, Choiceshirts, and Name Maker.
The most interesting general trend from the article is that several of the interviewees refer to the fact that they had to develop proprietary technologies themselves to [...]

Internet custom products marketplace company Zazzle recently announced that it had acquired Confego, a San Francisco Bay Area company that provides software that enables brands to offer fully customized apparel, bags and footwear designed from the ground up. Confego co-founders Brennan Mulligan and David Gross have joined Zazzle effective immediately.

Confego manages order fulfillment and [...]

The ARTIVIDUUM fashion label recently has recently opened a store in Frankfurt, the German metropolis on the Main river. In February 2007, owner Verica Hauch opened the doors to her new store. She opted exclusively for tailored and, more interestingly from this website’s perspective, mass-produced customized clothing. She uses the slogan “Be your [...]

In July, 2001 Gale International negotiated a joint venture agreement with POSCO E&C (Korea’s largest engineering and construction company) and the City of Incheon, South Korea, for the planned development of a completely new city, called Songdo City. Located at the site of General MacArthur’s 1950 landing, Songdo will be the first “new” city [...]

Kerry and Bryce Moore. Designers and owners of Context Furniture in Royal Oak, Michigan, USA, have written a guest article in Metromode, an online magazine based in Michigan.  In the article (written as a series of posts over a week in February), they explain how their company has utilised mass customization and manufacture on demand [...]

Two articles have recently been published that provide an interesting comparison between current car manufacturer’s approach to personalization, and the prsonalization ideas put forward by up-and-coming auto design students.
In the manufacturer’s corner is Skoda (part of the Volkswagen Group), which was reported in UK magazine Auto Express as planning to offer a service to add [...]

I am a little late in writing about this, but it is worthwhile: Last month The Guardian, a UK newspaper, described how Moshe Einat is developing new inkjet technology that uses thousands of ink drops rather than a small number of nozzles.
Einat is a lecturer and researcher at the College of Judea and Samaria [...]

Auto Express, a British car magazine, reports in a short news item that BMW are:
“…working on a design for a super-efficient factory that can make bespoke cars in five days, instead of the current wait of up to six weeks. But there’s one hitch - it could be eight years before the “fully flexible” production [...]

In a post titled ‘3D Printer Brings Vision to the Poor‘, Mark Proffitt looks at how digital manufacturing technology is being used to provide eyeglasses to people in low-income countries, where the conventional optician service would be far too expensive for those that need it.
Mark Proffitt notes that:
There are two obstacles to providing eye glasses [...]