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“…infrastructures simultaneously shape and are shaped by — in other words, co-construct — the condition of modernity… To be modern is to live within and by means of infrastructures, and therefore to inhabit, uneasily, the intersection of these mul
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Barry Schwartz on defaults and choice architecture. Clever cartoon too.
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“So designers, choose the choices carefully. Whatever users get when they don’t make a choice is probably what most people will end up with. And contrary to popular belief, most people don’t actually want to make more choices.”
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“Recency bias is a tool we can use to improve user comprehension and overall satisfaction. By considering the sequence of information… and the (intentional?) placement of distractors, we can avoid common pitfalls in user judgments and decision making.”
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When will the entertainment industry learn?
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“Today, if you’re an urban dweller in a city like London, New York or like me, living here in Tokyo you probably make a conscious effort to disconnect.” Thanks to Mayo for the link.
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“Tapping into young people’s already considerable status anxiety and offering rewards that can only be realised by shopping is a recipe for a lifetime of misery, not… adults whose instinct is to ask, “How can I help?” rather than, “What’s in i
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Extremely interesting wide-ranging article by Ralph Caplan about signage, correcting errors in design, usability, perceived affordances, and so on. Thanks to Mayo for the link.
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“We want to avoid, or at least minimize, the startling systematic mistakes that science is discovering. If we know the common patterns of error or self-deception, maybe we can work around them ourselves, or build social structures for smarter groups.”
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“In Japan, the camera on mobile phones can be as high as 5.2M Pixels and they could be used for sneak shots such as spy shots and/or dirty pictures… Japanese manufacturer have stopped the disabling of shutter sound in silent mode” Via dev.null.org
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Appalling usability, use/damage marks and an officious anti-photography security guard - so many interesting things rolled into one story!
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“When people are made to be self-aware, they are likelier to stop and think about what they are doing… a shift away from acting on autopilot toward more desirable ways of behaving.” Via nudges.wordpress.com
Pretty Cuil Privacy
Published July 28th, 2008 in Business model, Consumer rights, Design philosophy, Design with Intent, Digital rights, Good design, Google, Internet economics, Privacy, Service design and Surveillance. 3 Comments
New search engine Cuil has an interesting privacy policy (those links might not work right now due to the load). They’re apparently not going to track individual users’ searches at all, which, in comparison to Google’s behaviour, is quite a difference. As TechCrunch puts it:
User IP addresses are not recorded to their servers, they say, and cookies are not used to associate a computer with queries. The data is simply dumped as it is created. That means user data cannot be turned over to others, whether its via blind stupidity or lawsuits.
This strategy’s similar to an issue Scott Craver discussed a couple of years ago as part of his ‘privacy ceiling’ concept (I covered it a bit here at the time): effectively, whatever information you collect could become a liability for you at some point, so if you don’t need it, design the system so it simply doesn’t collect it in the first place.
Dredging up some old ideas
Published July 28th, 2008 in Articles, Design philosophy, Design with Intent, Essays, University and Vague rhetoric. 1 CommentThree essays I’d pretty much forgotten about, written for courses at Cambridge during my Master’s in Technology Policy, linked here for no reason in particular:
Peer Treasure: how firms outside the software industry can use open source thinking
How can we strengthen links between entrepreneurial companies and entrepreneurial universities in the UK?
Motor vehicles in the developing world: options for sustainability* [all PDFs]
How to fit a normal bulb in a BC3 fitting and save £10 per bulb
Published July 21st, 2008 in Arbitrary, Bad design, Bad profits, Britain, Built Environment, Bureaucracy, Business model, Circumvention, Consumer rights, Design, Design with Intent, Do artifacts have politics?, Environmental, Fightback Devices, Freedom to tinker, Intrusive technology, Legislation, Lock-in, Monopoly, Political design, Propaganda, Rent-seeking, Sustainability, Technical protection measures, Technology policy and User experience. 16 Comments
Standard 2-pin bayonet cap (left) and 3-pin bayonet cap BC3 (right) fittings compared
Summary for mystified international readers: In the UK new houses/flats must, by law, have a number of light fittings which will ‘not accept incandescent filament bulbs’ (a ‘green’ idea). This has led to the development of a proprietary, arbitrary format of compact fluorescent bulb, the BC3, which costs a lot more than standard compact fluorescents, is difficult to obtain, and about which the public generally doesn’t know much (yet). If you’re so minded, it’s not hard to modify the fitting and save money.
A lot of visitors have found this blog recently via searching for information on the MEM BC3 3-pin bayonet compact fluorescent bulbs, where to get them, and why they’re so expensive. The main posts here discussing them, with background to what it’s all about, are A bright idea? and some more thoughts - and it’s readers’ comments which are the really interesting part of both posts.
There are so many stories of frustration there, of people trying to ‘do their bit’ for the environment, trying to fit better CFLs in their homes, and finding that instead of instead of the subsidised or even free standard 2-pin bayonet CFLs available all over the place in a variety of improved designs, styles and quality, they’re locked in to having to pay 10 or 15 times as much for a BC3 bulb, and order online, simply because the manufacturer has a monopoly, and does not seem to supply the bulbs to normal DIY or hardware stores.
Frankly, the system is appalling, an example of exactly how not to design for sustainable behaviour. It’s a great ‘format lock-in’ case study for my research, but a pretty pathetic attempt to ‘design out’ the ‘risk’ of the public retro-fitting incandescent bulbs in new homes. This is the heavy-handed side of the legislation-ecodesign nexus, and it’s clearly not the way forward. Trust the UK to have pushed ahead with it without any thought of user experience.
Continue reading ‘How to fit a normal bulb in a BC3 fitting and save £10 per bulb’
Donella Meadows’ Leverage Points
Published July 21st, 2008 in Control, Design, Design philosophy, Design with Intent, DwI Method, Philosophy of control, Political design, Sustainability and Technology policy. 0 CommentsScott Wilson first pointed me in the direction of Donella Meadows’ ‘Leverage Points - Places to Intervene in a System‘ [PDF, 93 kB], and it’s been very useful in thinking about the ‘Design with Intent’ idea at a system level rather than just the myopic preoccupation with armrests on park benches and interface design which it could have become.
Buckminster Fuller on Design with Intent
Published July 18th, 2008 in Design, Design philosophy, Design with Intent, Friday quote, Good design, Innovation, Sustainability, Technology and Trimtab. 3 CommentsBuckminster Fuller, talking to the New Yorker in 1966, quoted in this article by Elizabeth Kolbert:
“I made up my mind . . . that I would never try to reform man—that’s much too difficult. What I would do was to try to modify the environment in such a way as to get man moving in preferred directions.“
That’s what this research is all about. Design as trimtab, perhaps, with all the debate, decisions, multidisciplinarity and implementation issues that implies.
Many thanks to Rick Thomas for sending me the quote.
And on the multidisciplinarity issue, Metropolis currrently has a feature on Fuller including this perceptive quote from Chuck Hoberman (of Hoberman sphere fame):
“I think he’s [Fuller] been highly influential as an iconoclastic spirit, who never accepted that the boundaries between disciplines were anything other than something to be climbed over or circumvented in some way. To me that’s not so much a heroic stance as much as a very practical way to proceed in the world today. That’s also why he pre-staged a lot of what’s going on now.”
Richard Thaler at the RSA
Published July 17th, 2008 in Choice Architecture, Consumer rights, Defaults, Design, Design philosophy, Design with Intent, Future, Hidden persuaders, Interaction design, Political design, Techniques of persuasion and User Psychology. 4 Comments
Richard Thaler, co-author of Nudge (which is extremely relevant to the Design with Intent research), gave a talk at the RSA in London today, and, though only mentioned briefly, he clearly drew the links between design and behaviour change. Some notes/quotes I scribbled down:
Continue reading ‘Richard Thaler at the RSA’
Hard to handle
Published July 15th, 2008 in Britain, Design, Design philosophy, Design with Intent, Environmental, Forcing functions, Health and safety, Interaction design, Mistake-proofing, Poka-yoke, Product design, Traffic calming, Usability and User Psychology. 11 Comments
British Rail’s drop-the-window- then-stick-your-hand-outside- to-use-the-handle doors puzzled over by Don Norman in The Design of Everyday Things are still very much around, though often refurbished and repainted as with this delightful/vile pink First Great Western-liveried example.
I’m assuming that this design was intended to introduce an extra step into the door-opening procedure, a speed-hump, if you like, to make it less likely that a door was opened accidentally while the train was in motion (before central door locking was introduced - which makes it less necessary). From a usability point of view, we might immediately dismiss any system which has to have such detailed instructions to inform the user about performing such a simple task, but it’s certainly interesting to consider this kind of poka-yoke. Being forced to lowering the window to get to the handle is almost like a modal ‘Are you sure you want to delete this file?’ dialogue box.

However, other concerns come into play and now need to be considered in addition: this sticker suggests keeping the window closed to cut drag and save fuel, but as I walked along the train, almost all these windows were dropped down, left in that position by the last person to close the door. The urgency of scrabbling to lower the window, stick your hand out and use the handle, with a crowd of commuters behind you probably overwrites any intentions to close the window again engendered by the ‘Make a small change’ sticker.

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“Are guards not answerable to those they’re supposedly protecting, and who are paying their salaries? How about a sign that cuts to the chase: “Don’t question us, just do as you’re told.”"
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“Waiting in line is a very old-school way of dealing with scarcity. And treating new customers like old customers, treating unknown customers the same as high-value customers is painful and unnecessary.”
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“Highlight the floor of the trade show and let me see which paths are walked the most. Or give me glasses that let me follow in the footsteps of people I admire. Or let me walk on paths no one else is walking on.”
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A thorough and thoughtful introduction to greenwashing from a new Brunel graduate, incl. this quote: “The Key to any good accreditation system is a pretty label. The average consumer is not interested in investigating what the label really means.”
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A gorgeously elaborated idea from David Friedman. I have to say, though, I’d focus on standardising the DC voltage that devices run off, rather than creating such a range of different plugs.
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My friend & colleague Alex, showing us that standards can drive things forward: they need not merely, as IKB himself put it, “embarrass & shackle the progress of improvements of tomorrow by recording & registering as law the prejudices & errors of today”


























