2021 · 4 months · Product Design Master
Computational Designer, Industrial Designer, Product Designer
Parametric furniture system where a Grasshopper algorithm produces endless unique lamps that still read as one family, with proportion and manufacturing rules encoded so every variation is printable. Paired with an online configurator concept for mass customization.
Mass customisation promises every customer a unique product. A generator that produces endless variations mostly produces bad ones, so someone has to curate the output, and curation is exactly the cost customisation was supposed to remove.
Every variation had to be printable and assembleable, and every variation had to read as part of one family. Both constraints have to live inside the algorithm, because there is no designer downstream to catch what it gets wrong.
A Grasshopper system that encodes proportion, balance and manufacturing rules as constraints rather than filters, so the design space itself contains only valid lamps. Paired with a configurator concept that separates technical controls, useful during design development, from the few parameters a customer should actually decide.
Computational designer and industrial designer. Market research, the generative algorithm, the product design, the configurator concept, and the renders.
A concept taken as far as a working generator and a service model, never to market. The algorithm produces one-of-a-kind manufacturable lamps with no designer curating the output, and denyo.org describes how an order would travel as data to a local maker. What it settled for me is the judgement of when customisation earns its overhead, which is the part that transfers to configurator work.
Noor left me a rule I still apply: bound the freedom, then guide it. Handing a customer every parameter produces worse lamps, not freer ones; the designer's job is choosing which few decisions genuinely belong to the user.
It also sharpened when customisation earns its overhead. Where parameters govern fit, a prosthesis or an insole, the value is obvious; where they only govern appearance, it thins to exclusivity, real but fragile ground for a product. What transfers is designing at the level of systems: authoring the rules and taste of a design space, then letting it draw.