Design with Intent | 2007 January

More educational architectures of control: museums

By Dan Lockton ⋅ January 30, 2007 ⋅ 4 comments

A ‘traditional’ museum display cabinet in the Kremlin museum, Moscow. I liked the owl.
Two very interesting posts from last week looked at the use of control in museum design – Frankie Roberto discusses trying to get children (in particular) to learn interactively, and Josh Clark has some thoughts on the way that museum and gallery [...]

Friday quote: Super-Cannes by J G Ballard

By Dan Lockton ⋅ January 26, 2007 ⋅ 3 comments

J G Ballard, Super-Cannes, chapter 29:
Thousands of people live and work here without making a single decision about right and wrong. The moral order is engineered into their lives along with the speed limits and the security systems.
Re-reading Ballard’s excellent Super-Cannes, since the way the winter afternoon sunlight suddenly caught a building a few days [...]

No photography allowed

By Dan Lockton ⋅ January 22, 2007 ⋅ 4 comments

A couple of recent stories on photography of certain items being ‘banned’ – Cory Doctorow on a Magritte exhibition’s hypocrisy, and Jen Graves on a sculpture of which “photography is prohibited” – highlight what makes me tense up and want to scream about so much of the ‘intellectual property debate’: photons are no more [...]

Incompati-babel

By Dan Lockton ⋅ January 21, 2007 ⋅ 2 comments

A clever comment on incompatible (and DRM’d) formats by eboy’s flunters. (Via rss.euge.de)

Education, forcing functions and understanding

By Dan Lockton ⋅ January 21, 2007 ⋅ 6 comments

Mr Person at Text Savvy looks at an example of ‘Guided Practice’ in a maths textbook – the ‘guidance’ actually requiring attention from the teacher before the students can move on to working independently – and asks whether some type of architecture of control (a forcing function perhaps) would improve the situation, by making sure [...]

Some links

By Dan Lockton ⋅ January 17, 2007 ⋅ 2 comments

First, an apology for anyone who’s had problems with the RSS/Atom feeds over the last month or so. I think they’re fixed now (certainly Bloglines has started picking them up again) but please let me know if you don’t read this. Oops, that won’t work… anyway:
‘Gadgets as Tyrants’ by Xeni Jardin, looks at digital architectures [...]

Dependence

By Dan Lockton ⋅ January 17, 2007 ⋅ 3 comments

Karel Donk has some intriguing thoughts on ‘maximising the upside’ of life, by reducing dependence on other people, status and possessions, so that there is less to lose:
So one of the important things in life is to be as independent as possible and rely on very few things. After all, when it comes down to [...]

Coercive atmospherics reach the bus shelter

By Dan Lockton ⋅ January 16, 2007 ⋅ 3 comments

Jonathan Zittrain discusses scented advertising in bus shelters: the California Milk Processor Board recently tried a campaign with chocolate-chip cookie-scented “aromatic strips”, intended to provoke a thirst for milk, in San Francisco before having to remove them after allergy/chemical sensitivity concerns.
The use of scent (fresh bread, coffee, ‘new car smell’ etc) as a persuasion method [...]

Coincidence?

By Dan Lockton ⋅ January 10, 2007 ⋅ 12 comments

A few minutes ago I was playing a track in Winamp, with Gmail open in an Opera window, and on refreshing Gmail, the Google ‘web clip’ at the top of the inbox display contained the same phrase, ‘jet stream’, as the track.
Is that merely a coincidence, or does Gmail monitor what music is being played [...]

Shaping behaviour: Part 2

By Dan Lockton ⋅ January 10, 2007 ⋅ 8 comments

Speedometer, rev counter and fuel and temperature gauges on the dashboard of my 1992 Reliant Scimitar SST. Photo taken on B1098 alongside Sixteen Foot Drain, Isle of Ely, England.
In part 1 of ‘Shaping behaviour’, we took a look at ’sticks and carrots’ as approaches for shaping (or changing) people’s behaviour. It’s especially worth reading and [...]

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Archive for January, 2007