Customers taking over the creative process

For all the makers out there, doing stuff yourself is nothing new (that's pretty much what makes a maker a maker). Usually it means going to to the hardwarestore and firing up the blowtorch but companies are beginning to see the potential in the creativity of their customers.

On the 20th of April, there was a conference in Copenhagen called CustomerMade focused on this. CustomerMade is taking customization one step further. It's not about choosing the leather in your car it's about designing the car yourself theoretically speaking.

Since this being a Danish thing of course they had a speaker from Lego. He talked both about how they involved users in the process of creating the next version of Lego Mindstorm NXT (Wired wrote an excellent article about it a while ago) and how you can design your own LEGO kit. In a 3D program you build your legomodel out of all the available bricks. Then you and everyone else can buy the kit you designed. Very cool indead.