Everyday Hacker - everyone's not a designer

Participation is the new brand loyalty. What is better for participation than inviting your customers to do the personal customization themselves? Designing stuff for people to like and hope for their loyalty in return is not going to work anymore. Troed Troedsson, a future researcher, has found that up until the mid-eighties the key differentiator was knowledge. Nowadays it is understanding. Understanding what your customer wants and desires. Who is better on understanding their needs than the customer herself?

There are several very good examples on how to engage the customer in participation and designing according to their own desires and understanding on who they are:

• Make your own chair. Buy a cubic formed chair with a hammer. Use the hammer to form it as you like.
• Hacking IKEA. Make a children's chair out of a normal chair buy sawing a hole in the seat.
• Fan popcorn popper. When buying a popcorn popper, get it with your favorite team logo on it.
• Amazon Webservices. Build your own Amazon bookstore using the backend features of Amazon.
• Cookies and cakes. Buy a cookie mix and add eggs (Dan Ariely showed that without the eggs there is too little participation).
• Scion car designed by you and manufactured by Toyota together with a backbone of 1000's of partners.
• Threadless combines custom T-shirt designs with easy to shop for those who don't know what to design.

What should you think of when entering the mass-participation era?

• Design for different levels of customer participation. The occasional customer, the regular and the hard-core.
• Make it easy to switch between levels of participation. Make the customer a success regardless of participation.
• Enable your IT systems and supply-chain to handle great flexibility. How to plug-and-play in the back-end towards partners? Can you be as flexible as Toyota with Scion where the the car is manufactured and then pimped by one or more partners through an advanced supply-chain?

Then of course there are always those who don't know what they want. Be sure not to confuse them with alternatives. Make it easy to participate and co-create or you will loose everyone except the most hard-core fans.

Finally you will get many more ideas on how to develop your future products through the understanding gained from your customers.

More to read:
March 2010 article in Wired: Destroy is the new DIY
Dan Ariely in The upside of Irrationality