Right now, there’s a popular notion in product design that millennials (“those self-centered whiners”) love customization more than other segments of the population (“probably because they are self-centered whiners”).
In reality, customization has been the norm for most of human history. The last 200 years have been the exception: an invention of markets and mass production rather than a natural inevitability.Ancient Hand Axes
In distant days we made things to our own liking, to fit our own needs and desires, however eccentric they may have been.
Some needs to be met were clearly utilitarian — sharp points to pierce flesh and hunt game or grinding stones to mash vegetation into something more digestible.
Other objects we will never fully understand, their context long forgotten: artifacts that could be ritual objects, decorative embellishments, status symbols or something else entirely.
All of these forms were one-offs. Each object embodied the quirks of its maker and bore witness to their skill or lack thereof. Handmade products were inferior in their consistency object to object, but this way of making also enabled a fluid process of changes and improvements.
An object’s type and form were fixed only once, at the time of making — each tool could be made to perfectly fit the hand of whoever wielded it, each vase made more elegant to the eye of its ideal beholder. Hypothetically, every object was an improvement on the last, becoming more pleasing in proportion, better balanced, higher performing.
But as more complex technologies were developed, the need for twinned parts grew acute.
Wheels needed to be closely matched to work properly, archers could be more accurate if the shape and mass of their arrows were carefully controlled. Military-sponsored efforts to standardize weapons and ammunition played out over hundreds of years, only arriving as the status quo in the 1700s. From there, the technological and theoretical leaps required to get to cheaper, faster, more identical products piled on quickly.
Scientific breakthroughs in physics, material science, and chemistry enabled new categories of product-objects. Perfect duplication expanded from goods that required it as a functional property to those that offered a potential for business efficiency. The object as a tangible cultural artifact became the object as product — certainly still a tangible cultural artifact but in a new way….