Assignment 1 - Research

[hotcocoa]

Assignment 1 (Deadline: Monday 25 August)
Research existing mass customisation product design tools.
Start with the products and/or brands that you own and are familiar with, e.g., t-shirts/Addidas, shoes/Nike, bags/Crumpler etc., and research ways that these products can be customised either at the time of purchase or afterwards.

"Each assignment will require a written report and a presentation to be given in class."

Any notion of what's to be included in the research (eg. do we also research for our following assessments on the design and creation of a prototype)? How long is the report and presentation? Upload the report on Ning or submit in dropbox?

[Lucy]

i wonder about those specific details too ;_; *waits here*

[Mandy]

i don't think anyone knows.... how vague can the assignment details get? o_O we'll just have to ask him on monday.

although i'm pretty sure your research is meant to be based on/ help you gather ideas for the later assignments.

[Rob Saunders]

All good questions!

Report should be submitted as a blog entry, it should be relatively short (no longer than 500 words) but interesting and well illustrated.

For the presentation, let's experiment with using images uploaded to Ning. Just tag your images with "presentation1".

[Georgie]

What specifically are we supposed to discuss in our report???

[Rob Saunders]

Georgie said:

What specifically are we supposed to discuss in our report???

The DECO2013 web site has been updated with a much more detailed description of what is expected in the presentation and report.

In recognition that this update has come very late, I'll accept reports posted to the blog throughout next week. Hopefully, this will also give people a chance to respond to comments from their presentations.

Just in case the DECO2013 web site goes down, like it has just now, I'll include the information here as well:

Assignment 1 (Deadline: Monday 25 August)

Research existing mass customisation product design tools.

Start with the products and/or brands that you own and are familiar with, e.g., t-shirts/Addidas, shoes/Nike, bags/Crumpler etc., and research ways that these products can be customised either at the time of purchase or afterwards.

Report

Your report for this assignment should provide a brief introduction to the application of mass customisation that you are interested in, e.g., jewellery design, car design, fashion, etc. You should provide some thoughts about how you would ideally like to be able to customise designs for your chosen product area.

You should compare a couple of different examples of mass customisation related to your chosen application. You may also choose to review examples of mass customisation from other application areas that you think may provide interesting ideas for how your chosen product area may be customised. You should try to review these examples critically and give a brief overview of what they do right and what you think they could do better.

In particular, you should think about how (a) users might engage in a process more like design, and (b) how techniques like the grammars that we've been looking at in class so far might assist in the customisation process.

Your report for this assignment should be submitted via Ning as a blog entry. Your report should be no more than 500 words long, but should be illustrated by including screenshots of the mass customisation systems being discussed and/or the products that can be produced.

Presentation

To introduce the rest of the class to your chosen application of mass customisation, you should prepare a single slide that illustrates the customisation task. You should be prepared to talk for just 5 minutes about your chosen application of mass customisation. You'll need to briefly give an introduction, a comparison about the state-of-the-art, and a brief summary of what you think the opportunities are for doing it better.

NOTE: Talking for just 5 minutes (and making it interesting) can be very hard. Think about this as sort of "pitch" where you want to convince the other members of the class that this is a truly interesting application and one that they should consider researching themselves.

You should upload your presentation slide as an image to the Ning web site as an image and tag the image with "presentation1". An album will be created to contain all of the slides uploaded with this tag that we will use in class for the presentations, so it is very important that you include the "presentation1" tag when you upload your image.

Assessment Criteria

The assessment of this assignment will be based on the evidence provided in your report and presentation that you have engaged with this research exercise in order to critically review the state-of-the-art and suggest ways that these types of systems can be improved.

HD = An application (or potential application) of mass customisation has been clearly defined that shows great potential. Three or more relevant mass customisation design systems have been reviewed and compared. Similarities and differences have been drawn and potential areas for improvement have been iden

[Beth]

I have to say I'm still confused/overwhelmed, maybe I'm just in a rutt. "a comparison about the state-of-the-art" I think I may just be over thinking it. anyone with any thoughts?

[hotcocoa]

Uhm.. I'm stuck on the first line "your chosen application of mass customisation" - does it mean a chosen application that we researched or one that we want to create?

It's so hard find something that isn't customized already. I think most that I have found have been good in concept (but not necessarily in overall use).

Beth said:

I have to say I'm still confused/overwhelmed, maybe I'm just in a rutt. "a comparison about the state-of-the-art" I think I may just be over thinking it. anyone with any thoughts?

[Mandy]

along similar lines of confusion.... does anyone know, or can guess, whether we're meant to have a concept going already or are we just presenting what we found from research?

[Andrew]

Mandy said:

along similar lines of confusion.... does anyone know, or can guess, whether we're meant to have a concept going already or are we just presenting what we found from research?

thats like wat im wanting to know ey, lik can we present multiple ideas? or is that more of a case of : thats just making more work for yourself ?

[Martha]

what i got from it was that we were supposed to use the features of other mass custimisation sites to create our own site.. but that could be completely wrong

i agree also that there isnt much that hasnt already been done, im guessing its like last year where we are just presenting ideas on what we would like to create like we did with the iphone and using other sites to compare what works and what we would improve

[Lucy]

Beth said:

I have to say I'm still confused/overwhelmed, maybe I'm just in a rutt. "a comparison about the state-of-the-art" I think I may just be over thinking it. anyone with any thoughts?

Im afraid i don't understand that bit too ;__;'

[Andrew]

Lucy said:

Beth said:

I have to say I'm still confused/overwhelmed, maybe I'm just in a rutt. "a comparison about the state-of-the-art" I think I may just be over thinking it. anyone with any thoughts?

Im afraid i don't understand that bit too ;__;'

"comparison about the state of the art" i think thats lik robs fancy way of saying 'what are mass customizations like today and compare them' in ur chosen field :S