Michal Piasecki’s recent design – Weaving Bowl – was selected for the final of Young Design 2010 competition organized by Warsaw’s Institute of Industrial Design (IWP). During the project presentation at IWP, taking place on June 2nd this year, Michal emphasized how mass customization paradigm shifts designers and users roles. Designers’ focus moves away from a single solution towards a spectrum of possible forms, while the “users”, “customers”, “prosumers” or “co-designers” choose a single option from this spectrum.

Michal later moved on to describe the spectrum of Weaving Bowl’s forms, also often called the solution space. The product is controlled by three attributes: height, porosity and type of material. The size of the object is 20 by 20 by 4-16 cm and it is a 3d printed piece. It is designed to be manufactured using stereolithography, fused deposition modeling or selective laser sintering.

Parameter 1: height.

Parameter 2: porosity.

Parameter 3: type of material.

Different algorithms for browsing through a solution space of such product where also discussed. This part of the presentation was directly related to Michal’s PhD research, where he is looking at two distinctive approaches to the design of configurators:

- An elective approach where users define levels of each of the product attributes explicitly.

- An instructive approach – an implementation of genetic algorithms which enables users to manually select parents of next generations without a need to understand how many parameters control the product and what each of them is responsible for exactly.

These two approaches were compared in the Breeding Objects Experiment 1.