A study of design by customers: Areas of application

Abstract

In order to serve specific individual customers' personal needs which could not be fulfilled by mass production nor by mass customization , a Design by Customer concept has been recently introduced by researchers. Even though some applications seem to be visible from manufacturing point of view, the customer requirements may not be the same. A research to investigate the application area of design by customer concept from customer view is presented in this paper. The Kano model of customer satisfaction was used to gather and to analyze voice of customers. Customer satisfaction coefficients were generated based on the questionnaire. In addition, the importance level of design by customer system's capabilities were also investigated. The study concluded that the design by customer concept is considered to be applicable to some specific products like gifts and souvenirs but not in general. It also predicted that the concept will be successfully applied when the uniqueness is considered as an important feature of the products. However, deeper investigation is needed to get some more supports. © Springer-Verlag London Limited 2009.