The Shapeways Co-Creator Platform

August 12, 2009

The Shapeways Co-Creator Platform and what it means

Co-Creation is the general tendency of companies to work together with their customers in order to create value for them both. CK Pralahad, one of the co-coiners of the term has said, ”Think of Google. I can personalise my own page, I can create iGoogle. I decide what I want. Google understands that it can have a hundred million consumers, but each one can do what they want with its platform.”

With iGoogle, Google makes the platform, the content is provided by Google and many other publishers and users make it meaningful by personalizing the page to their liking.

The Shapeways Co-Creator Platform is our way of taking co-creation and 3D printing to combining the two. A designer can take a single design and turn that design into a template. Within the variables set out by the designer the buyer can then adjust or specify his own unique design within the confines of that template. Shapeways does the production, shipping, billing & customer service.

The customer can then very easily customize, personalize and create his or her own unique objects to his or her specifications. The Co-Creator Platform allows anyone buying a gift, for themselves or others, to tap into the skill and creativity of the thousands of designers, artists & animators on Shapeways.

A designer can now take any design they have and using Shapeways make it into something others can adapt and customize. The advantages for the designer are:

• Ship & sell real physical objects worldwide with start-up costs of a few hours of your time.
• Make unique designs for others in comparatively little time.
• Initialize and own the initial creativity and creative process.
• There is also no risk of designing something without getting paid.

This last point is the biggest practical difference and most unique thing about the Co-Creation platform. You could have previously entered into design competitions or do work made to order online. But, these both bring risks to the designer.

In a “made to order” scenario all the work before the customer agrees to buy the product is a risk taken on by the designer. Small errors in scoping, finding out what the customer wants could waste hours and end up underpaying or resulting in the designer not getting paid at all. Even if all goes well the constant pitching, emailing back and forth, negotiation and work to get a customer to choose you is a waste of the designer’s time.

Competitions are really made to order work whereby hundreds of thousands are asked to do a “made to order” assignment but where you end up paying only one. This clearly would provide uneven & unsure returns for participants. A competition is great for the organizer because it means that much more effort goes into your design than if you just paid one person. This is why we use competitions for fun and to inspire our community on Shapeways. However, when it comes to tools that we deploy to let our designers make money we have purposefully avoided competitions.

With a template a designer knows ahead of time how much time he or she will spend in customizing each resulting design. The returns for the designer would be more constant and more predictable. The designer gets to decide how much they want to earn for a quantity of work that they can estimate. And possibly most importantly the customer only comes to them once they’ve already paid for the product. This means that expectations, returns and deliverables are managed for both the designer and that designer’s customer on Shapeways.

We think that the Co-Creator Platform points towards a future where consumers can design many of the objects that populate their lives and where designers can become “brands of one” by having their own production capacity.

Please note that co-creation does not consist of co-developing or co-designing products themselves. This process is co-design and could also occur between designer and customer but a better example of this would be our Creators such as the Ringpoem Creator.

For an overview of some short definitions of the relevant buzzwords you can check out the list below.

• Mass customization - Is allowing the customer to have and even create his own individual product or experience.
• Co-design, also spelled codesign is when a customer gets together with a designer and they both design the final product together.
• Open innovation: is the collection and collation of customer input and ideas to develop new services, products and concepts.
• Crowdsourcing is when a group of people are asked to perform a certain task or tasks to help achieve a common objective.
• Co-Creation is the general tendency of companies to work together with their customers in order to create value for them both. A classic example of this is iGoogle or Netvibes where the company provides a platform or tool that the customer can personalize to his or her liking.
• Competitions as in a traditional design competition is in my opinion none of these. Since it is just a ‘brief’ you send out to many people and end up paying only one. This is not the route to go through because in the long run it would limit the quality, variety and earning potential of our community.
• “Made to order” according to me does also not apply since it is simply a brief that one would send to a single person asking them to build whatever the brief says. Granted the difference between the Platform and made to order is at first glance a small one but by putting the designer in charge of the initiation of the project will over time lead to significant deviation between the two.

Depending on who you listen to or how narrowly or broadly define each term, what Shapeways is doing could possibly be all of these terms.

Our Creator products are pure mass customization tools. We develop a piece of software and a template and the customer gets to, within the confines of this template, create his own unique product.

Shapeways as an upload service whereby people get to upload their own designs that we can then produce could also be seen as mass customization & co-creation.

Our Shapeways Shops where any designer can upload a design and then sell it could be seen as co-design, open innovation, crowdsourcing and even co-creation itself.

The community member feedback, forum discussions and emails we listen to and discuss actually make up a significant portion of our own software development roadmap. With a little stretch this could be seen as co-design, co-creation and even crowdsourcing.

Now that you know the future of production and design, what are you going to do about it?