Design for Personalisation

Iryna Kuksa, Tom Fisher, Iryna Kuksa, Tom Fisher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367669881
• eBook ISBN: 9781317152439
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The principle of personalisation appears in a range of current debates among design professionals, healthcare providers and educationalists about the implications of new technologies and approaches to consumer sovereignty for 'mass' provision. The potential of new technologies implies systems of provision that offer bespoke support to their users, tailoring services and experiences to suit individual needs. The assumption that individual choice automatically increases wellbeing has underlain the re-design of public services. Ubiquitous personalisation in screen-based environments gives individuals the sense that their personality is reflected back at them. Advances in Artificial Intelligence mean our personal intelligent agents have begun to acquire personality. Given its prevalence, it is appropriate to identify the scope of this phenomenon that is altering our relationship to the 'non-human' world.

This book presents taxonomy of personalisation, and its potential consequences for the design profession as well as its ethical and political dimensions through a collection of essays from a range of academic perspectives. The thought-provoking introduction, conclusion and nine chapters present a well-balanced mixture of in-depth literature review and practical examples to deepen our understanding of the consequences of personalisation for our professional and personal lives. Collectively, this book points towards the implications of personalisation for design-led social innovation.

This will be valuable reading for professionals in the design industry and health provision, as well as students of product design, fashion and sociology.

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Part I

Personalising consumption, retail and digital spaces

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1 Personalisation and fashion design

Tony Kent

Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to explain personalisation in the context of the fashion industry and its implications for design. Personalisation, and more particularly customisation and co-creation, have become increasingly significant to fashion brands both through their products, apparel and accessories, their distribution and the location of the customising activity. In this respect, online and offline channels create further opportunities for interaction and engagement, blurring the boundaries between virtual and physical worlds and the opportunities for personalisation. These themes of consumer engagement embrace fast fashion and also slow fashion, multiple retailers and high fashion designers. In this context, the chapter will explore the dimensions of personalised fashion and its implications for design in an uncertain and complex environment.

Driven by consumer and media interest, fashion has become increasingly visible in contemporary society. Crane (2012) summarises its four dimensions, first as a form of material culture related to bodily decoration. It can communicate perceptions of an individual’s place in society. It can be symbolic, for example, through uniforms, and in defining, albeit ambiguously, gender and sexuality. Second, fashion can be a kind of language in which clothing styles function as signifiers, distinguishing styles, and fashion from fads. Meanings of some types of clothing tend to be stable and singular, such as men’s suits, while others are constantly changing and plural, for example, T-shirts and blue jeans.

Third, fashion can be understood as a system of business organisations that create, communicate and distribute it to consumers. Indeed, fashion pervades the consumption system as a whole (Firat et al. 1995). Consequently, fashion consciousness concerns not only clothes, but also ‘every other (re)presentable aspect of consumption that can be rendered as an image-producing act’ (p. 50). Finally, the social effects of fashion can be seen in the ways in which personal and social identity, of belonging and difference, are expressed and shaped by clothing and accessories. This dimension is closely related to discussions of fashion and its place in modern and postmodern individuality (Lipovetsky 1994). For Twitchell (1999), fashion provides opportunities for emblematic display, exhibitionism in the sense that individuals plan their clothing, but also decor and other consumption-based badges as a strategy for fitting into their targeted aspirational niche of personality and social status.

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The concept of personalisation, who is undertaking the personalising and its location contributes to and is formed by this complexity. Personalisation, its origination and ownership, can be found in the creativity and activity of the designer, fashion brand and the consumer. These dimensions are increasingly integrated in co-creative and co-productive engagement and processes. Fashion designers engage with subject matters such as identity, sexuality and gender and their communication through fashion dress, shows, and media. They seek inspiration from an eclectic diversity of sources including history and historical dress, different cultures, politics, economics, and technology (Matharu 2010). Their creativity is diffused through the system and its networks, where it is interpreted or appropriated for retail markets and ultimately recycled into street fashion. From the perspective of the fashion designer, personalisation is inherent in their designed collections, and through exposure to, and commentary by, the fashion and social media.

Designers and fashion labels, which have to be considered together, are identified by a personal style. In this sense, personalisation distinguishes the designer, the label and the brand with a consistent and recognisable identity. Notably, brand personality has a significant place in creating and maintaining a strong identity. The fashion designer can have a long-standing association or be consciously introduced to transform or reinvent the brand. Ralph Lauren epitomises the tradition of American sportswear, in which designer and brand are closely identified, while Chloé sought a new design direction by appointing Stella McCartney to re-create the brand. Personalisation can be manifested in a specific approach to design; Yamamoto’s style has consistently reflected his interest in shape and the folding of material. It may be defined by a single item and media exposure: Givenchy’s black dress worn by Audrey Hepburn in the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s epitomised the understated, refined elegance of his designs. More generally, British designers have demonstrated a ‘rebellious spirit’, and Belgian designers a ‘gritty and perfectionist attitude’ while maintaining distinct and varied styles (Matharu 2010, pp. 34–5). In these descriptions the sense of personalisation connects designer, events and places in contrast to the consumption of design, which has become increasingly placeless and ubiquitous.

The designer, the fashion label and brand are influenced, albeit in varying degrees, by their location: the places where designers work, present their collections and communicate through the media. The major fashion cities each demonstrate characteristics built around their fashion system, infrastructure and cultural heritage, which determine and maintain a distinctive style. They host fashion weeks for designers to present their collections twice yearly, typically for spring/summer and autumn/winter seasons. These serve a number of functions, such as demonstrating changes of style, materials and details, launching new designers, developing collaborations, and communication and promotion. A designer-led perspective essentially informs the relationships evident in these communities. However, other types of relationship between fashion producers and consumers are discussed in the next section.

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Fashion and personal identity

Personalisation does not lie exclusively in the domain of the designer or brand. From a consumer perspective, changes in consumption hold implications for fashion design and its location. Fashion expresses personal identity in the sense that the style of the products that people purchase, use and display ‘says something about who they are’ and serves as an indication of their social identity along with other aspects of their lives.

An awareness of consumers’ needs for self-identity and image form an important driver for personalisation. Twitchell (1999) demonstrates how fashion communicates personal identity both to others and to oneself. This can take the form of public display, from shopping bags to clothing, branded by names and visible logos such as Lacoste’s alligator and Ralph Lauren’s polo pony (p. 167). The connection between fashion and personal identity takes the form of individuals discovering their identity or identities through a process of understanding and interpreting their own responses to the various styles that are brought to their attention. Nevertheless, there remains a state of tension in the construction of identity: between this desire to be different and creative, and safe, easy acts of dressing. There is an ambiguity in fashion between innovation and conformity, revealing and concealing, which influences individual approaches to clothes (Woodward 2007).

Theory developments in hedonic consumption and consumption experiences (Holbrook and Hirschmann 1982; O’Shaughnessy and O’Shaughnessy 2002) have contributed to a new awareness among producers of consumer identity. More macro, cultural perspectives of consumer behaviour conceptualise the consumer as a socially connected being with the focus on consumption (Belk 1995). Further, the essential activity of consumption may not be the actual selection, purchase or use of products but the imaginative pleasure seeking to which the product image lends itself and a desire for novelty (Campbell 2012). Such postmodernist perspectives on consumption explain a preference by individuals to avoid commitment to a specific identity and to remain free to experiment with different identities (González 2012). This reflects the development of subcultural, intellectual, and personal differences among consumers and the extent to which such heterogeneity appears in the variety of unique offerings available to their consumption experiences (Firat and Dholakia 1998).

Diversity and pluralistic openness has contributed to marketing-related trends toward the creation of unique offerings targeted at finely segmented groups of consumers. The essence of differentiated segmentation as a marketing strategy can be viewed as one hallmark of postmodernism (Holbrook 1999). In a consumer-driven world, consumers may find the potential to become a participant in its customisation, by immersing themselves as an object into the world of objects, instead of trying to maintain a privileged and detached position from an object (Firat et al. 1995). The ‘customising’ consumer takes elements of market offerings and crafts a customised consumption experience out of these.

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Individual fashion, through a proliferation of choice is evident in eclectic and street-fashion styles, and stands in contrast to the organisation of directed or co-ordinated fashions by fashion designers, their intermediaries and media commentators. An increasing appetite for technology has led to the emergence of the ‘prosumer’ – someone who demands superior products, that might once have been the preserve of professionals or experts, even for a hobby or leisure activity. Consequently, the role of the designer and fashion design has changed, as consumers have become more engaged in informing and co-creating fashion (Holbrook 2001). Multiple consumer identities are enabled by greater variety provided by the growth in fashion retailing, more specialisation and faster fashion. A move from producer-led to consumer-led fashion has resulted in the individualisation of mass-produced and standardised fashion.

Fast fashion

These organisational and individual perspectives on personalisation are evident in the tensions of fast fashion. While designers continue to present seasonal collections, fashion retailers have moved towards shorter, non-seasonal periods in order to respond to new trends or looks. Fast fashion is defined by affordable prices achieved by sourcing from low-cost producers and the use of quick-response supply chains, which enable frequent changes to collections and colourways to maintain originality and style. For example, a leading multiple retailer Zara, can bring new designs to market in less than four weeks.

Consequently, fast fashion has a hedonic purpose, where consumers expect fresh and fashionable offerings, and expectations of frequency and scarcity are reflected in an urgency to buy before the look sells out. With this approach to fashion, there is an absence of ties to the personality of a single stylist or a specific place in a global culture of fashion and brands. Fast fashion enables eclectic personal identity building that combines many different elements that are temporary and unstable. Retailers have been able to exploit original designs and designers, and in this way create competitive space. Zara, H&M and TopShop have successfully engaged with limited collaborations and concepts of mass exclusivity.

More broadly, ‘masstige’ enables consumers to enjoy the perception of luxury by combining mass-produced lines with an additional element of prestige, typically through design and branding. H&M through designer capsule collections create time-bound moments of luxury, and introduce scarcity into abundance. Social media provide access to extensive commentaries and images from blogs to designers’ runway shows and fashion events. The results of mixing and matching to create individual style preferred by many consumers is reflected elsewhere in the personalisation of their lives. As such, retailers as fashion intermediaries enable consumers to create their own style in a world that is globally interconnected, regionally differentiated and personally individualised all at the same time (Light 2014).

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Fast fashion enables consumers to create their own identity and multiple identities. It is eclectic, provides access to new ideas and products, and focuses on availability and affordability. Consequently, design is driven by speed and accuracy of interpretation for specific consumer markets, and less concerned with originality. Indeed, multiple media enable fashion to be disseminated so quickly and with so many interpretations that looks and styles follow on so fast from each other that the designer collection is replaced by consumer ‘mash up’. Not surprisingly, brand logo often creates the point of distinction in a process where fashion brands are designing for the consumer to personalise.

Service-dominant logic

The availability of fashion and the opportunity to engage with the materiality of fashion and its images, has contributed to a diversity of personalising and customising activities. The opportunities for participative individualisation are increasingly significant to fashion brands through their products, apparel and accessories.

From a goods-dominant perspective of the fashion system, suppliers produce products and customers buy them. Market exchange in this view is concerned with transactions, and commoditised outputs based on mass production (Pine and Gilmore 1993; Lusch and Vargo 2014). With service-dominant logic (S-DL), customers engage in dialogue and interaction with their suppliers during product design, production, delivery and consumption. Such interactions are defined by co-creation, to describe customer–supplier dialogue and interaction and recognise the micro-competences of individuals and households (Schembri 2006). S-DL suggests that value starts with the supplier understanding customer value-creating processes and learning how to support customers’ co-creation activities. Thus, the customer ‘always being a co-creator of value’ is a key foundational proposition of this logic (Vargo and Lusch 2014; Payne et al. 2009).

Effectively, S-DL extends the concepts of relationship building. A service-centred view of marketing sees a continuous series of social and economic processes and a learning process in which to identify or develop core competences: fundamental skills and knowledge that represent potential competitive advantage; identification of other entities (potential customers) that could benefit from these competencies; and cultivation of relationships that involve customers in developing customised, competitively compelling value propositions to meet financial needs. It also requires marketplace feedback by analysing financial performance from exchange to learn how to improve the firm’s offering to customers and improve the firm’s performance. The dominant logic of S-DL is ‘the application of specialized competences (knowledge and skills), through deeds, processes, and performances for the benefit of another entity or the entity itself’ (Vargo and Lusch 2014, p. 40). Interaction, integration, customisation and co-production are hallmarks of this service-centred view.

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Four elements condition the co-production process: First, control and the variable domain of experience. Second, temporality, a recognition that the meaning and value of the brand changes over time in response to changes in the ambient cultural environment and evolution of consumer goals, for example, the value of retro brands. Intergenerational contexts show that brands’ propositions can become emblematic signs of family continuity. At a more micro level, firms ‘can invoke consumers’ repertoires of memories through their brand communication to imbue their consumption with a sense of continuity and connection to the past’ (Arnould et al. 2006, p. 98). Finally, the existence of multiple customers links brands to other people.

These elements of SD-L and consumer culture theory are reflected in human-centred design approaches. Meroni and Sangiorgi (2011) distinguish twenty-first-century design from the predictability of the twentieth century, with its focus on the development and production of objects. Designing process and outcomes have become in...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Design for Personalisation
• Design for Social Responsibility
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction: Design and Personalisation – by a Person or for a Person?
• Part I Personalising Consumption, Retail and Digital Spaces
• Part II Personalising Communication, Marketing and Manufacture
• Part III Personalising Health
• Conclusion: What Happens Next? Themes and Principles for a Personalised Future
• Index