They’re back up (well, the wave files anyway), thanks to the Internet Archive.
High frequency wave files back up again
Published May 31st, 2006 in Architectures of Control, Art making a point, Audio, Built Environment, Cell phones, Civil rights, Consumer rights, Control, Creeping erosion of norms, Crime, Design, Design engineering, Designed to be unpleasant, Disabilities, Discrimination, Discriminatory Architecture, Distasteful corollary, Do artifacts have politics?, Dystopia, Engineering, Engineering design, Entertainment, Erosion of liberty, External Control, Fightback Devices, Gadgets, Health and safety, Innovation, Interaction design, Intrusive technology, Invention, Killjoy technology, Liberty, MP3, Mobile phones, Mosquito, Music, Open source, Oppression, Orwellian, Philosophy of control, Podcast, Political design, Product design, Retail, Ringtones, Shopping, Sneaky, Social engineering, Sound weapons, Techniques of persuasion, Technology, Technology policy, Teenagers, Underclass, Urban, User Psychology and User experience. 0 CommentsBBC: Bram Cohen on network neutrality
Published May 31st, 2006 in 1984, Analog hole, Arbitrary, Architecture, Architectures of Control, Broadcast flag, Business model, Cinema, Consumer rights, Control, Copyfight, Copyright, Creeping erosion of norms, DRM, Designed to be unpleasant, Digital rights, Discriminatory Architecture, Distasteful corollary, Do artifacts have politics?, Dystopia, Entertainment, Erosion of liberty, Feature deletion, Freedom to tinker, Future, Greasing palms, Hidden persuaders, Intellectual property, Internet economics, Intrusive technology, MP3, MPAA, Motoring, Movie industry, Music, Music industry, Norms, Oppression, Orwellian, Philosophy of control, Political design, Propaganda, RIAA, Razor blade model, Rent-seeking, Sneaky, Speeding, Technical protection measures, Techniques of persuasion, Technology underclass, User Psychology, User experience, Video and Your property. 0 CommentsThis BBC Newsnight story, by Adam Livingstone, about the possibilities of a two-tier internet - ‘BitTorrent: Shedding no tiers’ - has an interesting fictional ‘architectures of control’ example to illustrate the possibilities of price discrimination in networks (see also Control & Networks):
“So there’s me driving up to Homebase… and I get to within half a mile of the store and my car starts to slow down.
Before I know it, I’m doing five miles an hour. What’s more, half the other cars around me are doing the same. But the cars on the other side of the road are all fine. So I turn round and head home and suddenly it’s all back to normal. “What on earth is going on?” as our man Paxman would say.
“It’s simple” said the grease monkey at my local garage. “The people who made your car have done a deal with B&Q. They’ve fixed it so that if you ever drive towards Homebase, you’ll start going at 5 miles an hour.”
High frequency ringtone download
Published May 25th, 2006 in Architectures of Control, Art making a point, Audio, Built Environment, Cell phones, Civil rights, Consumer rights, Control, Creeping erosion of norms, Crime, Design, Design engineering, Designed to be unpleasant, Disabilities, Discrimination, Discriminatory Architecture, Distasteful corollary, Do artifacts have politics?, Dystopia, Engineering, Engineering design, Entertainment, Erosion of liberty, External Control, Fightback Devices, Gadgets, Health and safety, Innovation, Interaction design, Intrusive technology, Invention, Killjoy technology, Liberty, MP3, Mobile phones, Mosquito, Music, Open source, Oppression, Orwellian, Philosophy of control, Podcast, Political design, Product design, Retail, Ringtones, Shopping, Sneaky, Social engineering, Sound weapons, Techniques of persuasion, Technology, Technology policy, Teenagers, Underclass, Urban, User Psychology and User experience. 47 Comments
High frequencies being tested in the urban badlands: see, no teenagers here!
A lot of people find this site through searching for something along the lines of ‘Mosquito high frequency anti-teenager ringtone’, and are presumably disappointed when they find that there is no such ringtone to download, even if just because they’d like to test it on friends and family. (More on the Mosquito device) There’s also the more possibility of course of using the ringtone as a kind of ’secret ringtone’ that, supposedly, only younger people can hear, so you can receive text messages, etc, e.g. while in class, without adults noticing, though I’d have thought that was partially the point of the vibrate mode.
Anyway, I thought I might as well give those searching what they’re looking for, sort of.
Continue reading ‘High frequency ringtone download’
Brake-Fast Doggie Bowl
Published May 23rd, 2006 in Animals, Architectures of Control, Design, Design engineering, Embedding code, Engineering design, Forcing functions, Gadgets, Good design, Health and safety, Innovation, Interaction design, Invention, Mistake-proofing, Product design, Traffic calming, User Psychology and User experience. 4 Comments
Image from www.brake-fast.net
Thanks to Steve Portigal and Page Sands for bringing this to my attention: the Brake-Fast Doggie Bowl is designed to stop dogs wolfing down their food quite as quickly as they would otherwise, which can cause painful (and dangerous) bloating. The raised prongs act like ‘traffic calming’ to slow down the dog’s eating.
This is a clever forcing function architecture of control, with the intention of making life better for the animal without risk of injury. There’s also another interesting feature - or rather deliberate lack of one:
(Q) The brake-fast(R) bowl slides all over the floor when my dog eats.
Why didn’t you put a non-slip edge on the bottom?
(A) We had a lot of discussion about the bowl sliding. In the end, we decided the purpose is to make the dog slow down their consumption rate, having the bowl slide adds that much more time when eating.
(From the Brake-fast website)
There are many examples of feeding systems or toys designed to entertain and distract dogs (and other animals) while being fed, since dogs clearly enjoy challenges, particularly when they result in a ‘reward’ of food. Steve points me to Kong dog toys which are designed to be filled with food which the dog can only get at by playing with the toy and chewing it, and I should also mention Simon Crilley’s Canine Joystick, a more advanced system which actually monitors the extent of the dog’s play before sending a signal to a wall-mounted food dispenser (another image here - PDF link).
