Design with Intent | 2006 September

Locking users in by making it difficult to leave

By Dan Lockton ⋅ September 11, 2006 ⋅ 12 comments

Privacy International has a report, ‘Dumb Design or Dirty Tricks?‘ on the practice of a number of popular websites – most notably eBay and Amazon – of lacking an easy or obvious way for a user to delete his or her account:
“Amazon provided the most blatant example of companies that refuse to provide account delete [...]

Uninnovate – engineering products to do less

By Dan Lockton ⋅ September 10, 2006 ⋅ Post a comment

Image from uninnovate.com
I’ve just come across a very interesting new blog, uninnovate.com, which focuses on the phenomenon of “engineering expensive features into a product for which there is no market demand in order to make the product do less.” The first few posts tackle ‘Three legends of uninnovation‘ (the iPod’s copy restrictions, Sony’s mp3-less Walkman, [...]

Transcranial magnetic stimulation

By Dan Lockton ⋅ September 7, 2006 ⋅ 7 comments

An image from Hendricus Loos’s 2001 US patent, ‘Remote Magnetic Manipulation of Nervous Systems’
In my review of Adam Greenfield’s Everyware a couple of months ago, I mentioned – briefly – the work of Hendricus Loos, whose series of patents cover subjects including “Manipulation of nervous systems by electric fields”, “Subliminal acoustic manipulation of nervous systems”, [...]

Some links: miscellaneous, pertinent to architectures of control

By Dan Lockton ⋅ September 1, 2006 ⋅ Post a comment

Ulises Mejias on ‘Confinement, Education and the Control Society’ – fascinating commentary on Deleuze’s societies of control and how the instant communication and ‘life-long learning’ potential (and, I guess, everyware) of the internet age may facilitate control and repression:
“This is the paradox of social media that has been bothering me lately: an ‘empowering’ media that [...]

Some interesting aspects of built-in obsolescence

By Dan Lockton ⋅ September 1, 2006 ⋅ Post a comment

This San Francisco Chronicle review of Giles Slade’s Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America (which I’ve just ordered and look forward to reading and reviewing here in due course) mentions some interesting aspects of built-in (planned) obsolescence – and planned failure – in technology and product design:

Planned addiction as a method of control: a parasitic lock-in business model

By Dan Lockton ⋅ September 1, 2006 ⋅ 2 comments

The news that tobacco companies have increased the levels of nicotine in their brands over the last few years – especially those popular with certain groups – made me think further about architectures of control:
“The amount of nicotine in most cigarettes rose an average of almost 10 percent from 1998 to 2004, with brands [...]

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