UPPS
UPPS stands for Ultra Personalised Products and Services. Ultra personalisation is the process of designing products that are tailored to the exact needs, preferences and anthropometrics of a specific individual. This adds more value than standard product offerings resulting from mass production.
Why UPPS
People are surrounded by products tailored to their specific size and shape: clothes, shoes, spectacles, sports products, as well as medical aids such as prostheses and wheelchairs. In order to be able to mass- produce these goods, industry has devised standard size/shape systems. However, existing solutions have a number of disadvantages: there is always a mismatch between the numbers produced and those sold/used, resulting in reduced margins and waste. Furthermore, products designed for mass-production do not match many people’s personal needs, even though an exact and personalised fit is essential. There is therefore a need for a radically different approach in product creation. Emerging digital technologies like 3D scanners, cloud services, and advanced manufacturing enable true ‘mass personalisation’ or ‘Ultra personalisation’, which has already yielded some early applications. At present, there is a lack of a design methods and tools for personalised production; to combine emerging digital fabrication technologies to design.
We are:
A unique interdisciplinary collaboration between 3 technical universities, Dutch manufacturing industries and design studios. We will drive the transfer of knowledge and tools from the lab to production.
Our UPPS Vision
The UPPS framework below is visualised as a roadmap. Starting at the customer, a track is followed where customer measurement and customer interaction play a key role in product design. The customer measurement is fitted alongside a population digital model to create a customer digital twin. Together with customer preferences, the digital product model and other important input, this digital twin ‘feeds’ the expert system. After processing al this data, an automated customised design track is followed to deliver the factory with all necessary information for a particular order. Eventually, user experience data, together with production feedback are cycled back into the expert system, improving quality and efficiency over time.
