The architects and designers who create inspirational workspaces are participants in a dynamic process of customization. Their mission is to be responsive to each client’s unique community and character, and to express those attributes in an environment that is unlike any other. Yet as tailored as these settings can be, they are rarely made of one-of-a-kind components.
Designers need tools to enliven the impersonal office and overcome the commonality of its prevailing furnishings. But how do these building blocks become more bespoke?
This is the new culture of Customization — a rising phenomenon today that empowers greater personal expression and creative participation in the demand for individualized products. Coalesse studies how customization has evolved in the greater design ecosystem, pushed both by a steady appetite for the value and heritage of crafted goods, and the democracy of newer technologies that engage consumers —and design professionals — deeper in the product-making equation than ever before.
Coalesse has explored this foundational theme of customization in product applications at NeoCon this year and in a thought-provoking discussion of the eras of customization: “Participate.”
The “custom” in customization is where this history begins. Its origins lie in the centuries-old artisan age and the earliest instinct for personal expression to elevate everyday objects. The custom is resurgent today in maker movements, where goods are created in a highly crafted and often exclusive way for the distinction, quality and status that their workmanship and design confer on the owner.
The custom also extends to the synergy in a sum of parts that can make a highly personalized result out of a combination of standard elements. In an office interior, this occurs increasingly when styles are cross-pollinated to create more layered, mixed-and-remixed spaces. The merging of the comforts of home (referred to as “the 1st place”) and the community of cafes (“the 3rd place”) into a new kind of workplace (“the 2nd place”) has become more commonplace today, replacing the generic office environments that were once standard.
It also happens in the application of modern craft to new furniture – making a basic chair or table more beautiful through finer materials and sophisticated or innovative fabrication. In the process, the custom is a way to create richer stories.
Customization is the all-inclusive process of personalizing design choices to create those richer stories.
It’s the how a product is specialized, and how much the designer can affect those actions, before the item is even produced. Designers make a custom choice every time they consider the color and pattern, material and features, or size and shape of each piece of furniture they use. Coalesse has developed capabilities to facilitate customization in many standard products — using new technological tools combined with expertise in customer support to guide products from inquiry to sample to ordering to production.
Customization is the next generation of what custom can become, with a mind to budgets, time, and convenience that can make personal expression more accessible.
The next chapter in this evolutionary process examines the exciting influence that consumer behavior has had on the development of customizing design tools. That demand for, and the remarkable ease of, personalization in the marketplace is fundamentally changing the collaboration between manufacturing and design — to make a more powerful mark — by bringing the new customization into many more products and spaces.
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