Thanks

Thanks to everyone who’s got in touch over the last few weeks with examples and interesting angles on the areas discussed on this site, and my apologies for having not yet replied to everyone. The response to the sudden increase in eyeballs and linkage (even if Technorati’s record/rating of this site seems to be somewhat [...]

Speed control designed to help the user

Something with an interesting ‘forcing function’ story has been right in front of me all this time: the QWERTY keyboard, developed by Christopher Sholes and then Remington, with the intention of controlling the user’s behaviour. Until typists became proficient with the QWERTY system, the non-alphabetical layout with deliberate, if arbitrary, separation of common letters allowed [...]

‘Secret alarm becomes dance track’

The Mosquito sound has been mixed (sort of) into a dance track:
“…the sound is being used in a dance track, Buzzin’, with secret melodies only young ears can hear.
…
Simon Morris from Compound Security said: “Following the success of the ringtone, a lot of people were asking us to do a bit more, so we [...]

Countercontrol: blind pilots

In a recent post, I discussed a Spiked article by Josie Appleton which included the following quote:
“Police in Weston-super-Mare have been shining bright halogen lights from helicopters on to youths gathered in parks and other public places. The light temporarily blinds them, and is intended to ‘move them on’, in the words of one [...]

Shaping behaviour at the Design Council

Photo by Kate Andrews
I’ve blogged before mentioning the work of the UK Design Council’s RED research arm, which applies ‘design thinking’ to redevelop and create public services appropriate for societal changes right now and in the years to come. The previous post was specifically about Jennie Winhall’s ‘Is design political?’ essay, but I’ve kept in [...]

Round-up of some control examples

Some examples I’ve come across over the last few days:

Designing out functionality: Verizon
Squub on Squublog, mentions a case of a product’s features being deliberately disabled with some intent (though it’s not clear exactly what benefit Verizon would get from doing this – does anyone have any ideas?):
“When I bought my Verizon 6700 Pocket PC [...]

BoingBoing podcast – direct link

Here’s the direct link for that new BoingBoing podcast – www.archive.org/download/…/boingboingboing_1_64kb.mp3 .
BB were almost the last people I’d expect to wrap up their audio in a Flash interface! Still, ‘View Source’ is a lot easier than having to use a Flash decompiler to extract the link.
Maybe an OGG version will be available for the next [...]

Is there a better term than “architectures of control”?

Welcome, readers from Metafilter and del.icio.us.
One point raised in the Metafilter discussion is whether the term ‘architectures of control’ is a sensible one for this phenomenon, and whether ‘architectures of control in design’ is a good title for the blog. I understand the issue; it’s something (clearly) I considered at length when starting my [...]

Deliberately reducing visibility at road junctions

An increasing trend among road planners in the UK is the use of fencing, hedges or banks deliberately to reduce visibility at certain junctions, especially roundabouts (traffic circles), presumably with the intention of forcing drivers approaching a roundabout to slow almost to a standstill every time, even if the roundabout is empty. This SABRE thread [...]

Designed to control rather than enable

As Cory Doctorow says, “Your home and life are increasingly full of devices that seek to control, rather than enable you.”
That, succinctly, is what this website’s about: design as something to restrict and control the user, rather than empower and enable. Products that enable you to do less. Products that force you to interact [...]