Randi and Teller among the authors. [No longer behind paywall: thanks, Cory]

"As magicians have long known and neuroscientists are increasingly discovering, human perception is a jury-rigged apparatus, full of gaps and easily manipulated."
For the Design with Intent research, techniques of misdirection are especially worth examining. Richard Wiseman & Peter Lamont's "Magic in Theory" addresses this pretty well I think.

"The RSA is launching a new project to ask how insights from cognitive and behavioural sciences can help us respond to pressing social challenges… we’re looking at how insights from a range of disciplines, including but not limited to neuroscience, behavioural economics, anthropology and social psychology may apply to concrete public policy challenges."

(via Michal Migurski) "Much of our thinking is two dimensional, and seldom gets beyond the three dimensional level of a side, elevation and plan drawing. There are not many three dimensional mechanisms – most, like Watt's linkage, are plane solutions. The differential, like the one in the ancient Chinese South-facing Chariot, is a beautiful exception. The idea did not appear in the West until the nineteenth century. Yet it cannot be described in words. Let any reader who does not know the differential's motions ask an engineer how it works. It cannot even be sketched without imagining the paper rotating end over end."

"So a “choice architect” is basically anyone that organizes “the context in which people make choices.” This is so immensely broad as to be almost useless… And if you invite people to a party where alcohol is available, the music is bumpin’, and the lights are low, you are choice architect. Everyone is a choice architect some of the time."

Interesting writing, but the Issuu interface is completely unusable.

"Much of our research started out as an attempt to understand the similarities and differences to what we already knew in order to create products and services that are more in tune with local markets. But increasingly we've had our eyes opened to the sheer ingenuity of people who figure out ways of doing a lot with very little – highly relevant for a planet having to make stark choices about sparse resources."

Dan Goldstein & Nassim Nicholas Taleb. "We make the distinction between "ecological" uncertainty, i.e., the type of uncertainty we witness in the real world, and the "ludic" randomness, the one in games and in laboratory setups. A series of experiments… aim, simply, at uncovering and cataloguing consequential errors that enter real-world decision making. In other words, errors that matter for real-life."

"The implication is that all (or most) professional training results to some extent in a distortion of the way the professional views the world. "When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail"."

"Decision research in Marketing, Psychology, Economics, Medicine, Law, Management, Public Policy & Computer Science". We need to add "Interaction Design" to that list.

"The idea of usability being fundamentally different than persuasion is deliberately artificial." Interesting to see another different approach to persuasion and design. I think John's "Design Guided Paths" description best matches what I'm investigating here.

"Indeed, after a few days of research we found out that the track wasn’t leaked by pirates, but by Josh Klemme, the manager of the band."

"A blog about how we might feel tomorrow."

"Relevant articles deal with normative, descriptive, and/or prescriptive analyses of human judgments and decisions. "

“…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

Barry Schwartz on defaults and choice architecture. Clever cartoon too.

“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.”

“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.”

When will the entertainment industry learn?

“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.

“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

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.

“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.”

“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

Appalling usability, use/damage marks and an officious anti-photography security guard – so many interesting things rolled into one story!

“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

“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.”"

“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.”

“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.”

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.”

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.

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”