A secretive project to enable consumers to “design” their own products is set to launch in a few weeks.
“Maix” appears to be a company using generative software to dynamically create consumer products. They explain:
Maix is an experienced and multi-disciplinary team of designers, developers and visionaries.We empower people to create physical products, quickly and easily by themselves. We use photos instead of complicated computer software as a design tool and disrupt the way products are being created. We’ve built an App that enables people without any experience to create beautiful, personal and unique products.
And here is their “five step process” for using the new system:
This seems very reminiscent of a few other select systems where designers create parametric 3D models of specific objects, and then customers are encouraged to tweak settings to adjust their size, shape and colors to achieve a desirable product.
Once a client has designed an object, it is produced by Maix behind the scenes. Based on their site and video, it appears they may be using 3D print technology to produce these objects, as it would make no sense at all to try and do this with traditional making processes like injection molding.
They apparently will launch an app, shown here, in which they will enable all this to happen. When they say “pictures”, I presume they mean the images shown by the app during “tweaking”. That visual approach should be familiar to almost anyone.
It’s an interesting idea, but others have had this notion before and have not succeeded in any large way. We’ll have to watch Maix and see how they fare.
Via Maix
