The Threadless guys kindly agreed for me to add my dissertation to HipHipUK entitled
“Do consumers want to design unique products on the internet?”
A study of the online Virtual Community of Threadless.com and their attitudes to Mass Customisation, Mass Production and Collaborative Design.
It will go up later today but the page is ready here http://www.hiphipuk.co.uk/research/
I surveyed over 200 hundred people from the Threadless Community and the result is 85 fun packed pages of research, pretty graphs, bad spelling and grammar all about Virtual Communities, Involvement vs Uniqueness, Manufacturing Approaches, Design Contests, oh and tshirts.
I didnt want it to sit gathering dust with the ideas going out of date, so hopefully somebody might find it useful.
I’ll also use some of the content on future posts here in the next few weeks/months.
I was just wondering whether you wrote this dissertation for some kind of academic purpose (like a university project), or just because you really like Threadless?
Also, why did you pick Threadless over Spreadshirt?
Anyway, I look forward to reading the whole thing, should be interesting.
Its was my undergraduate thesis so served academic purposes but also my love of Threadless. I also liked the challenge of writing on a really unusual and new topic considering my degree was Business Information Systems. Most people wrote theirs on Virtual Teams, CRM, Geographical Information Systems etc. I got to write about Virtual Communities and tshirts!
The original plan was to do half Spreadshirt/half Threadless as I was sort of arguing against the Spreadshirt Mass Customisation approach to product creation. The english speaking Virtual Community of Spreadshirt wasnt large enough to get a comparable datasize to my Threadless research so I had to drop that half. I discuss why I think this is in the Dissertation.
Hi Adam,
I am very interested in your dissertation for download, but still can’t find it on your webpage.
Could you help me please.
Thanks, Mike
Its up now Mike, I hope you find it interesting.
Do you want to post mine too? Your readers might like to compare a disseration that got a 2:1 with one that got a 1st?! If only you had a better grasp of the english language
xxxx
If only you’d taken the time to proof read it for me like I asked, and did for yours I seem to remember?
Uni weren’t ready for my radical “advancements” of the english language.