Interview with Sir Clive

Chris Vallance of Radio 4’s excellent iPM has done a thoughtful interview with Sir Clive Sinclair, ranging across many subjects, from personal flying machines to the Asus Eee, and touching on the subject of consumer understanding of technology, and the degree to which the public can engage with it:
Your [Chris Vallance's] generation really understood the [...]

links for 2008-06-27

Vox Popoli: The importance of condescension
Amazing stylised rant about ‘other people’s incompetence’ interacting with a ticket machine in the Paris Metro…
(tags: rant usability interaction interactiondesign interface ticketmachine Paris design)

TDWTF Forums – The importance of condescension
…inspiring this wonderful riposte. I have some sympathy with both points of view, but fundamentally, I’d rather design a system that [...]

links for 2008-06-24

BBC – Mark Easton – Nudge
Some interesting readers’ comments, many fundamentally opposed to the idea of ‘nudges’, at least in the government-led way suggested by the article.
(tags: nudge BBC behaviour libertarianpaternalism)

links for 2008-06-23

Tomy’s new piggy bank rewards savings with in-built RPG – Boing Boing Gadgets
Persuasive games? “Every coin you pump into the bank is translated into gold, which can be used to buy weapons, items and armour for your character.”
(tags: persuasion persuasivetechnology games saving money)

Tomorrow Museum
“A collection of interesting ideas curated by Joanne McNeil and Jerry Brito.” [...]

Paper Rights Management

This delivery note from Springer informs me that the book I’ve bought “must not be resold”. Good luck with that. So have I bought it or not? Or have I bought a licence to read it? What if I give it away?
Many companies would love to be able to control what users can do with [...]

Cross-purposes?

Last week I was at a seminar where a fellow student was outlining some (very interesting) research about how to adapt ‘professional’ products to be usable by a ‘lay’ audience (what functions do you retain, what do you lose, how do you deal with different mental models? and so on)
He repeatedly referred to the importance [...]

Getting someone to do things in a particular order (Part 4)

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 (coming soon)
Continued from part 3
This series is looking at what design techniques/mechanisms are applicable to guiding a user to follow a process or path, performing actions in a specified sequence. The techniques that seem to apply with this ‘target behaviour’ fall [...]

Sarah Burwood: Tumble Sums

We’ve covered teaching machines and programmed learning textbooks a few times on the blog, and I’ll admit to a general fascination with analogue computing and similar ideas, ever since reading John Crank’s Mathematics and Industry as a teenager, after finding it in a skip (dumpster) along with a lot of other very interesting books*. It [...]

Exploiting the desire for order

I met a lot of remarkable people in Finland, and some of them – they know who they are – have given me a lot to think about, in a good way, about lots of aspects of life, psychology and its relation to design. Thanks to everyone involved for a fantastic time: I was kind-of [...]

Lights reminding you to turn things off

Duncan Drennan, who writes the very thoughtful Art of Engineering blog, notes something extremely interesting: standby lights, if they’re annoying/visible enough, can actually motivate users to switch the device off properly:
Our DVD player has (to me) the most irritating standby light that I have ever seen on any device. When on, the light is constantly [...]