“Steps are like ready-made seats” (so let’s make them uncomfortable)

Adrian Short let me know about something going on in Sutton, Surrey, at the same time both fundamentally pathetic and indicative of the mindset of many public authorities in ‘dealing with’ emergent behaviour:
An area in Rosehill, known locally as “the steps”, is to be re-designed to stop young people sitting there.
Not only will the steps [...]

Un-hiding an affordance

These (pretty shallow) steps in Dawlish, Devon, have been labelled as such, presumably because without this, some visitors wouldn’t notice, and would run, cycle or wheelchair down them and hurt themselves or others. Painting a white line along the edge is a common way of improving visibility of steps, but actual labelling is fairly unusual. [...]

Ann Thorpe: Can artefacts be activists?

Ann Thorpe, author of the intriguing-sounding Designer’s Atlas of Sustainability – is pursuing an interesting investigation into design activism:
Some of the basic issues around design activism include:
# isn’t all design activism?
# how much design should be activist – aren’t designers supposed to be meeting client needs?
# are there best practices for design activism?

Low bridge in [...]

Cyclepathology

A lot of architectures of control / design with intent examples are trying to enforce what I’ve termed ‘access, use or occupation based on user characteristics’. Not all designs are especially successful at achieving that target behaviour: users will not always be persuaded, or will find ways to avoid being coerced.

Bicycles can churn up the [...]

Getting someone to do things in a particular order (Part 3)

Continued from part 2
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 fall roughly into three ‘approaches’. In this post, I’m going to examine the Poka-yoke approach. If you’ve been following the previous posts, you’ll probably [...]

Getting someone to do things in a particular order (Part 2)

Continued from part 1

These are the suggested mechanisms applicable to User follows process or path, performing actions in a specified sequence – they fall roughly into three ‘approaches’. In this post, I’m going to examine the System element approach.
System element approach
This approach includes mechanisms relating to the layout and properties of system elements, hence all [...]

J G Ballard & Architectures of Control

Over at the brilliant Ballardian, editor Simon Sellars has just published my article ‘J.G. Ballard & Architectures of Control‘, where I take a brief look at how Ballard’s work repeatedly examines ‘the effect of architecture on the individual’ – something central to both the physical and psychological aspects of my research. Many thanks are due [...]

Towards a Design with Intent ‘Method’ – v.0.1

As mentioned a while back, I’ve been trying to find a way to classify the numerous ‘Design with Intent’ and architectures of control examples that have been examined on this site, and suggested by readers. Since that post, my approach has shifted slightly to look at what the intent is behind each example, and hence [...]

Design with Intent

I’ve recently been doing a vast amount of reading (and writing a brief paper) on architectures of control-type strategies and precedents, from lots of different fields, as a precursor to planning the first practical parts of my PhD research, and in trying to classify and categorise different approaches, I’ve once again had to think about [...]

I believe in mirror-queues

Meagan Call has written a very interesting piece examining the technique used in some (women’s) public restrooms* of moving the mirrors to the wall near the entrance/exit, rather than behind the sinks as might be expected (and is usually found in mens’ facilities), to lessen queueing and speed up throughflow:

Women often linger, using the excess [...]