If you are a manufacturer wanting to make your goods based on a user-driven design, you will need to provide a tool to your users by which they can tell you online exactly what they want. This article introduces an  Online Designer Framework  (ODF) from which specific online designers can be derived easily.

Scientists think that a good deal of the 21^st century economy will be based on user-driven design: Users will no longer pick  the one variant out of a product range that approximates their requirements best. Instead, they will make up a design of the solution they want, subject it to various simulations, hone it exactly to their requirements and finally place an order. The manufacturers will feed that design into their own CAM-machinery and will, ideally, fulfill the order just in time.

As a present-day example, think of the way how  application-specific integrated circuits  (ASICs) are developed today: At the user's premise, an in-house ASIC specialist develops a first design, improves the design iteratively (subjecting it to an array of simulations) and finally passes it to the semiconductor manufacturer.

Well, an ASIC is quite a sophisticated product. Only a highly trained specialist can make a meaningful design of it. - But now, think the other way round: Couldn't comparatively simple products be made following a user-driven design as well - such as photo albums, mobile telephones ("Handys") or knitwear products? To that end, obviously, the manufacturer would have to provide a design tool to the potential clients. But what would that mean?

In answering this question you might arrive at quite similar ideas like Eric von Hippel or Nikolaus Franke (see http://www.myitblog.com/Thinker/47/ or http:http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/j.0737-6782.2004.00094.x/abs/)
By the way: The examples mentioned above were not taken at random - they are some of the first products made by user-driven design! (See e.g. http://www.pixopolis.de/, http://www.designyourhandy.de/ http://www.wildemasche.de/ or http://www.shirtcity.de/.)

Let's think a bit about the principles such a tool should be built around (more).

Online Designer - Principles

As a basic idea - I think we can easily agree on that such a design tool would have to be an  online designer  right in the first place. It would make sense only if is available over Internet and produce designs that can be sent over Internet to the manufacturer.

How should the software of such an online designer be designed? After quick thinking, we might come up with the following - partly contradictory - ideas:

1. An online designer should give maximum flexibility to the users, to compose as many details into their design as they wish, whatever can be manufactured. (Eric von Hippel calls it "solution space")
2. Yet, the users should be lead in their design to use only those design elements that have a meaning for the manufacturer. A symbol that is undefined at the manufacturer's just cannot be implemented in the delivered product!
3. A user-driven design should be stored locally on the user's computer, to be developed further the next day or so. Not before the user  intentionally  sends it to the manufacturer, the design should be released to the Internet. The privacy of the user must always be maintained!
4. Hardly any of an online designer's users will be a specialist, working with it every day. Most of the users will be  casual users  who do not know more about it than what they can see on screen. So, an online designer should offer them a step-by-step help, Undo/Redo features, tool tips, etc.
5. An online designer should be completely self-contained. Working with it should impose no special requirements - a standard PC with Internet connection should be enough, no special software downloads should be needed! (The Internet connection should not even have to be broadband - though this would be helpful, of course.)
6. Don't forget - such an online designer is also an  investment  in the manufacturer's business. Thinking economically, it should be easy to develop a specific online designer, starting from an  online designer framework  (ODF). So, the documentation should be written with two disparate groups in mind: The users, and the developers of a specific application ("appliers").
7. Obviously, the same simplicity as for the users should be true for the appliers, too: No special software (e.g. compiler, debugger) - if possible, only JavaScript required to derive a specific online designer from ODF.

I developed an ODF, following these ideas. You can get hands-on experience of it (with IE browser only) at http://www.itspecial.org/Toolkits/ODF63.htm

Don't expect a fully-fledged application with all the bells and whistles you are accustomed to with commercial software. For the time being, it is just a  prototype , meant only to show you how a tradeoff between these principles could be reached.

To be practically useful, it would have to be polished considerably. This, however, is beyond my personal means.