When acting as co‐designers, customers face new uncertainties and risks, coined “mass confusion” in this article. Building on a construction strategy of empirical management research in the form of six case studies, we propose the use of online communities for collaborative customer co‐design in order to reduce the mass confusion phenomenon. In so doing so, we challenge the assumption made by most mass customization researchers that offering customized products requires an individual (one‐to‐one) relationship between customer and supplier.

Previous research in computational aesthetics has led to the identification of multiple image features that, in combination, can be related to the aesthetic quality of images, such as photographs. Moreover, it has been shown that aesthetic artworks possess specific higher-order statistical properties, such as a scale-invariant Fourier spectrum, that can be linked to coding mechanisms in the human visual system. In the present work, we derive novel measures based on a PHOG representation of images for image properties that have been studied in the context of the aesthetic assessment of images previously. We demonstrate that a large dataset of colored aesthetic paintings of Western provenance is characterized by a specific combination of the PHOG-derived aesthetic measures (high self-similarity, moderate complexity and low anisotropy). In this combination, the artworks differ significantly from seven other datasets of photographs that depict various types of natural and manmade scenes, patterns and objects. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that these features have been derived and evaluated on a large dataset of different image categories.

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Art images and natural scenes have in common that their radially averaged (1D) Fourier spectral power falls according to a power-law with increasing spatial frequency (1/f2 characteristics), which implies that the power spectra have scale-invariant properties. In the present study, we show that other categories of man-made images, cartoons and graphic novels (comics and mangas), have similar properties. Further on, we extend our investigations to 2D power spectra. In order to determine whether the Fourier power spectra of man-made images differed from those of other categories of images (photographs of natural scenes, objects, faces and plants and scientific illustrations), we analyzed their 2D power spectra by principal component analysis. Results indicated that the first fifteen principal components allowed a partial separation of the different image categories. The differences between the image categories were studied in more detail by analyzing whether the mean power and the slope of the power gradients from low to high spatial frequencies varied across orientations in the power spectra. Mean power was generally higher in cardinal orientations both in real-world photographs and artworks, with no systematic difference between the two types of images. However, the slope of the power gradients showed a lower degree of mean variability across spectral orientations (i.e., more isotropy) in art images, cartoons and graphic novels than in photographs of comparable subject matters. Taken together, these results indicate that art images, cartoons and graphic novels possess relatively uniform 1/f2 characteristics across all orientations. In conclusion, the man-made stimuli studied, which were presumably produced to evoke pleasant and/or enjoyable visual perception in human observers, form a subset of all images and share statistical properties in their Fourier power spectra. Whether these properties are necessary or sufficient to induce aesthetic perception remains to be investigated.