Michal Piasecki attended Mass Customization and Personalization conference in Helsinki (MCPC 2009), where he presented the Review of B2C Online Product Configurators. There where couple of really interesting issues raised during these intensive two days and I would like to begin with discussion of the term “personalization”. Posts on automation in architecture as well as B2C product configurators will follow.

Personalization as an umbrella term

Diversity of meanings applied to the term “personalization” was quite astonishing. For example: Bruce Kasanoff used it to name nearly any kind of mass customization. His examples ranged from products up till body customization with electronic devices.

Personalization as an process in which user is passive with respect to product attributes

Sunnika and Brage’s literature review provided an interesting insight on the distinction between “mass customization” and “personalization”. Their work is an automated literature review, facilitated by text mining algorithms. They have found that “mass customization” referees more often to tangibles, while “personalization” is rather used in the context of “intangibles”. In other words mass customization is likely to be about products, while personalization is associated with information.

This goes in the same line with what Sean Hanna and I proposed in our review. We considered “mass customization” as the process in which user is active with respect to product attributes, while we referred to “personalization” as a process in which user is passive with respect to product attributes. We discussed recommender systems the examples of personalization.

Another interesting input from Sunnika and Brage is that exactly the same distinction in computer science literature was described as a difference between “adaptability” and “adaptivity”. Where “adaptability” is a process in which the user is active, while adaptivity is an automated process.