Rules of a Game or Satisfaction of Needs?

Mass customization is now kind of a fashion term in the industries, witch is used to persuade the customers selling them the idea that the product they are getting is unique but the question is it unique? Comes to our minds do to the fact that is the same product but with an additive component such as texts, colors, parts, etc, trying to make it call a distinctive product.

In the industry of golf exist the idea of mass customization do to the fact that each person has different capacities to perform a golf swing, for example a six years old girl will perform a natural movement because of her flexibility and also because the muscles are in fact growing and in the phase of memorizing movements, but in order to do this she would not be able to perform the swing if the weight, the size, the shaft, and so on are not suitable for her age, size, strength etc. If we get to explain every golf swing in terms of people’s size, strength, rotation, age, etc, we get to find billions of different golf swings so do to this fact the golf clubs industry generate a pre-fabrication process in order to satisfy as many as possible needs in terms of golf swings. So this process is trying to get the golf clubs unique because the golf swing is unique for every golf player, but it’s all about the mass production of components like shafts, heads and grips, but in the unity of this different components you get to make a golf club suitable for your golf swing.

In the same way, the Smart car develop this idea of customizing your car but its again in the mass production of components that you get to buy a “unique” car. In terms of design we don’t see the uniqueness of the car because it is just the colors or the graphics what gives the car a differentiation from one to another.

By crossing this two examples of pseudo mass customization we find more attractive the fact that in the joint of different components you can find the real uniqueness of a product to satisfy the different needs of people but applying this to architecture and more specific to the development of housing end in a prefabrication process were people gets to pick the different components of their house in order to get a exclusive one, but does it really response to customization? Then what is the meaning of customization? Is it about giving some regulation to a game or really trying to satisfy the needs of each different way of living?