FutureFactories: marketing RM in design-led products
Lionel Dean - Future Factories
ABSTRACT - The author began FutureFactories in 2002 as a one year design residency at the University of Huddersfield. The project was deemed to be 'blue-skies' research; the technology seemed too expensive and insufficiently durable for retail products. This was a fast moving area of technology however and, before the residency period was completed, the first RM retail products began to appear on the market. For designers, the time had come to create actual business models from the speculation.
FutureFactories has moved from prototypes and one-off 'art' commissions, to serially produced retail designs. To utilise the flexibility of RM to the full, new business models need to emerge that challenge the established order of production and marketing. The most recent FutureFactories product brings the project very close to its research aims of mass individualisation. Icon, a piece of titanium jewellery, is individualised; each piece in a limited edition run of 100 pieces, is a unique iteration of a meta design.
This paper will consider through as series of case studies, the business issues surrounding the use of RM in design led consumer products. It will examine the practicalities of marketing RM today and speculate on possible futures.
Biography
Lionel is a graduate engineer and has a Master's Degree from the Royal College of Art, London. He worked as an automotive designer for Pininfarina in Italy before launching his own studio in 1989. Lionel's work explores the boundaries between Art and Design. In 2002, as then Designer in Residence at the University of Huddersfield, Lionel began FutureFactories, a concept for designs that evolve and mutate to create a potentially infinite stream of one-off solutions. These designs would be produced using Rapid Prototyping techniques. Initially blue skies research, the project has proved a huge success and has yielded a string of products ranging from gallery pieces to retail designs for well known manufacturers. FutureFactories has been exhibited in London, Milan, and New York. In 2005, one of Lionel's pieces was acquired by MoMA, The Museum for Modern Art in New York, for its permanent design collection.
Today Lionel focuses exclusively on digital manufacturing. Lionel is creative Director of FutureFactories, speaks widely on digital design and manufacture and is a Senior Lecturer in Design at De Montfort University, Leicester.
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