Personalisation is at once ubiquitous in contemporary life and a master of disguise. Its complexity hides in plain sight. Personalisation may mean producing products and services to ideas of individual demand, but it also means much more than this. Personalisation connects diverse practices and industries such as finance and marketing, medicine and online retail. But it also goes by many aliases – patient-centred, user-oriented, stratified and segmented – in ways that can make it hard to follow. It’s not always clear what personalised products and services share in common.
The ‘People Like You’ project does not shy from this diversity. It works across the fields of medicine, data science, and digital culture to understand the differences in each of these domains, as well as how people and practices work across them. One challenge of understanding emerging practices that are forming within and between particular industries is that histories of personalisation may be contested, sensitive, or rapidly developing. We want to find ways to explore different meanings of the term ‘personalisation’ in the United Kingdom, among people from different working backgrounds: academic and commercial scientists in the biomedical, biotechnology and pharmacology; public policy; advertising and public relations; communications; logistics; financial analysis. So we have designed a study that might be the first of its kind in the UK – an oral history of personalisation.
The ‘What is Personalisation?’ study uses stakeholder interviews to establish how and why each industry personalises, and with what techniques of categorisation, monitoring, tracking, testing, retesting, aggregation and individuation. These interviews are in-depth and semi-structured. They usually last an hour or more. Interviews allow us an opportunity to understand how a particular individual views their work, industry, profession or experience.
A wide range of policy makers, activists, scientists, technologists, and healthcare professionals have already participated, detailing how they see the emergence of personalisation affecting their lives. Striking themes have revealed just some of the connective aspects of personalised culture: the links between standardisation, promise and failure; how languages of democratic and commercial empowerment contest state, regulative, or market legislative and economic power; how products or services can treat prototyping as a continuous process; the influence of management and design consultancies; and the way mobile technologies interpretr data in real time to produce ‘unique’ experiences for users. These are just some of the ideas that we have talked about during our interviews. We also get to discuss when and how these ideas emerged and became popular in a given industry, field or policy area.
The connections that can be made across different fields, practices, or industries can be contrasted to the highly specific emergence of personalisation in some areas. For instance, the special confluence of disability and consumer rights activism that formed alongside and, at times, in opposition to deregulation in healthcare systems in the late 1980s created individual (later personalised) health budgets, now an important policy instrument used by the National Health Service’s personalised care services. The challenge is to understand the historical and social formation of a particular patch in [personalisation’s history, its various actors and networks, to recognise adjacent and comparable developments. We are doing this whilst recognising broader patterns that are germane to other contemporary figures of personalisation. One of these may be the specific inclusion and exclusion factors that prevent a personalised service becoming a mass standardised service. Another is to understand whether or not personalisation is being heralded as a success or as a response to failure – not the best of all available options but an alternative to foregone possibilities].
Our work takes patience and a lot of help from those who are passionate experts in their field. If you feel you have an experience of personalisation that would make an important contribution to this study then please get in touch with William Viney (w.viney@gold.ac.uk).