"Colonnade was a drink manufactured by Holborn pharmacist G. R. Ferdinand following a trip to the United States in the 1890s. While there, he was intrigued by drinks such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola, marketed both for their thirst-quenching ability and their supposed medicinal properties."

My friend Tom Wright's new blog on London, psychogeography and history, real and imagined, promises some great reading.

What patterns recur in this list? Can we extract general cases, or a kind of pattern language for con tricks? How many of these could be turned into (deceptive) design techniques? I love this sort of list. (via Boing Boing)

Classic software project mistakes: an error pattern language? How many of these apply generally to projects (product design, engineering, political, personal, social, educational…)? Is there a kind of general analysis method for all this? Can things like TAFEI (http://books.google.com/books?id=TZSKZiocMJQC ) be applied on this scale?

"And so it is with a great many things. We can wait until the lifestyle that is killing the planet and is making us crazy and sick is no longer physically possible, or we can opt out of it ahead of time. And what we replace it with can be difficult at first, but quite a lot better for us in the end."

"For example, in cities, the degree of criminality is affected by liberty of movement; it’s higher in culs-de-sac. And high-rises are culs-de-sac: two thousand people jammed together in the air…"

"Attached to the top of each bottle is a cylinder. This cylinder is a cartridge that contains a concentrate. When you get the bottle home, you fill it with water and then attach that cartridge to the top of the bottle. Now when you squeeze the trigger you get a spray that is made up of tap water mixed on the fly with the concentrate in the cartridge."
Thanks Mayo for the link.
Armand Hammer himself was an intriguing person by all accounts…as I understand it, it amused him immensely to buy stock in Church & Dwight who made the baking soda and toothpaste, so that when people asked him if he made the products (kind of) bearing his name, he could say yes truthfully.

Adam Richardson, frog design

"Mr. Peñalosa's solutions may work in the developing world, but is North America ready for his happy revolution? Consider the advice he gave to planners in Los Angeles last year: Let traffic and congestion become so unbearable that drivers voluntarily abandon their car habits." Thanks Charles for the link

"We have done a fantastic job on usability of passwords. They’re so usable that anyone will type their password anywhere they see the word “password”…" (via Boing Boing)

Good idea. It also shows how clever design techniques so often _don't_ depend on having an 'academic' descriptor to be inspired in the first place. 'How dematerialisation adds value' is a great way of phrasing it, but was it ever thought of in those terms when the biscuits were designed? Of course not. Thanks to Mayo Nissen for the link

(via http://www.textsavvyblog.net/ )

On being sane in insane places: the power of confirmation bias.

"Like interactions between people, every dialogue between user and product can be framed as an exchange of power as well as meaning. Products like erasers and hammers submit to our intentions, while cell phones, books, and subways make us submit, either by seduction or force. This seduction/ force dichotomy gives us a second dimension for mapping a product’s temperament. Some products are designed to be invisible (gentle), others to make themselves known (rough). So we have: Dominant, Gentle; Dominant, Rough; Submissive, Gentle; Submissive, Rough." This is a very interesting suggested classification method indeed – worth further investigation.

By Sherwood Forlee. Nice use of deception to influence behaviour.

A major advantage of this – aside from the 'squabbling students' angle – is that only the compartment that's actually needed is opened when the fridge is used. That's going to to save a non-trivial amount of energy every year.
(via BoingBoing)

"The dissertation builds on available sociological approaches to understanding everyday life in the networked city to show that emergent technologies reshape our experiences of spatiality, temporality and embodiment. It contributes to methodological innovation through the use of data bricolage and research blogging, which are presented through experimental and recombinant textual strategies; and it contributes to the field of science and technology studies by bringing together actor-network theory with the sociology of expectations in order to empirically evaluate an area of cutting-edge design." Looking forward to reading this.

Jasper van Kuijk on desire paths.
(I really ought to get round to a proper post linking use marks and desire paths at some point; they can tell us a lot.)

"“We modified the bolt seal so that we could open it when we wanted to ,” he said. “See, we can take a bolt seal that is already on a container being shipped, modify it and enter the container whenever we want.” Someone who managed to slip these tampered bolts into the supply chain could steal millions of dollars of merchandise, smuggle goods or people in legitimate containers, or contaminate the food supply. I studied the bolt, intrigued that the security of our global supply chain rests on such an innocuous object."

"Folksy urban legends as management metaphors work great!" as one commenter puts it. Nevertheless, this is a good story (I think Lessig includes it in 'Code' too) whether it's true or not. From the point of view of this research I'm more immediately interested in the technique (influencing user behaviour) than the 'innovation lesson' (changing the problem) – de Bono, TRIZ, etc have all made this clear years ago. Incidentally, a 'TRIZ master' investigates the legend here – http://www3.sympatico.ca/karasik/GF_evolution_of_legend.html

"Yep. Jakob Nielsen invented spam. "

"Sentences are not maps… Most diagrams and maps aren’t friendly, either… An exceptionally friendly type of diagram is available. "
Interesting way of illustrating and understanding "valid user paths" among other logical relationships. Worth exploring I think.

"As a professor, I am in the constant company of 18- to-23-year-olds. I have taught at both public and private universities, and I have to report that the levels of comfort with, understanding of, and dexterity with digital technology varies greatly within every class. Yet it has not changed in the aggregate in more than 10 years… Only a handful come to college with a sense of how the Internet fundamentally differs from the other major media platforms in daily life."

"…a train with individual passenger compartments… "something that everyone manages to do on the Tube without the need for physical walls"… Public transport without all the downsides of it being public." Thanks to Mags L Halliday for the link.

"What if a sign did not simply tout new movies, sodas, and celebrity babies in one-way feeds, but instead revealed something unique about the building, its occupants, or its environment?" (via cityofsound)

Not sure why this wasn't already in the blogroll, been reading Dan's stuff for quite a while and always impressed.

"Reports from design and technology conferences and events".

"Reflections and reporting on the relationship of design, business and society."

"Slanty Design is kind of anti-affordance, a difficulty-of-use employed to achieve certain design decisions. I think even the acknowledgment of such tools mark a maturity of interaction design: it’s not solely about making things easy to use. (Just, perhaps, mostly?) Unfortunately, the use of slanty design isn’t always to encourage better behavior. Sometimes it’s just greed." Interesting example discussed by Chris Noessel.

"An interesting example of an extreme user was this deaf guy I saw the other day at the train station, walking and gesticulating in front of his video cell-phone. If you map the use of video-communication on cell-phone you get a very low usage of the feature in general but that guy would be an exception."

"Defensible space produced with lower-end means in Cuzco, Peru: shards of glass and cactus as a deterrent to jump over that wall."

Very much looking forward to reading Anne Galloway's PhD dissertation, A Brief History of the Future of Urban Computing and Locative Media.

"Blog of the Resource Efficiency Knowledge Transfer Network, highlighting issues, viewpoints and oddities encountered by the RE KTN team in promoting knowledge transfer leading to more resource efficient industry and commerce in the UK."

This, children, is what we call a _false dilemma_. It's an easy trick to use when we're trying to push an argument that won't stand up otherwise.
The IT Crowd did it better – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTbX1aMajow

Nice circumvention

"You don’t need to take a course or learn a new software package to design for flow. In fact, you’re probably already doing it. Begin by considering the desired outcome of every interaction and then removing everything that distracts the user from accomplishing that outcome." Very useful article by Trevor van Gorp.

Trevor van Gorp "exploring and understanding the “heart” of design; the effects of design on the emotional affect created by people’s interaction with products, brands and services."