links for 2008-07-29

Infrastructure and Modernity: Paul N Edwards [PDF]
“…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
(tags: architecture defaults infrastructure society technology)

Unnatural Selections – New York Times
Barry [...]

Pretty Cuil Privacy

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, [...]

Dredging up some old ideas

Three 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: [...]

How to fit a normal bulb in a BC3 fitting and save £10 per bulb

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 [...]

Donella Meadows’ Leverage Points

Scott 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 [...]

Buckminster Fuller on Design with Intent

Buckminster 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 [...]

Richard Thaler at the RSA

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:

Thoughtful Acts

Above & below: ‘Push’ Table by Jennifer Hing.

Jane Fulton Suri’s wonderful Thoughtless Acts? chronicles, visually, “those intuitive ways we adapt, exploit, and react to things in our environment; things we do without really thinking” – effectively, examples of valid affordances perceived by users, which were not designed intentionally.
Observing how people actually ‘make use’ of/hack the [...]

Hard to handle

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 [...]

links for 2008-07-15

Salon.com Technology | Ask the pilot
“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.””
(tags: airline airports control bureaucracy security ridiculous arbitrary TSA)

Seth’s Blog: Scarcity
“Waiting in line is a very old-school way of [...]