product design

Beautiful memo bridging the physical and digital worlds in service of the future of product design, personalization, and people’s agency around their experiences. By Toolhouse (Joe, OEM care).

Highlights:

An engine to help you build first person products — products whose utility is specific to you, and shaped with an imprint of your expression.

The finest products are custom, and the ability to produce custom products should be made as accessible as possible. Custom and accessible don’t need to be mutually exclusive.

As the material world grows to reflect the agility of software, products will become much more malleable.

As the technology matures, the scale of applications will grow to encompass larger systems of interchangeable parts. With the ability to generate variations for any product.

The goal throughout is the same: leverage machine intelligence to lower the ceiling of production so users can easily produce exceptionally personal products.

Principles:

1. Physical imagination: materialize ideas to transcend the digital/virtual realm with real world feedback.
   

2. Creative practicality: balance expression with real-world utility. Make imagination useful.
   

3. Play and accessibility: give users agency to shape their world by making the production process easily understandable and fun to use.
   

4. Dynamic personalization: a product is a living entity, capable of continuous improvements and adaptations in response to the user's evolving needs. Make the system capable to respond uniquely to individual preferences and requirements. If you build what you use, you learn to build better.

Also reminded me of Scott Belsky’s post on personalization.