Design with Intent | Art making a point

Two events next week

By Dan Lockton ⋅ May 20, 2009 ⋅ 4 comments

Next Wednesday evening, 27th May, I’ll be giving a presentation about Design with Intent at SkillSwap Brighton’s ‘Skillswap Goes Behavioural’ alongside Ben Maxwell from Onzo (pioneers of some of the most interesting home energy behaviour change design work going on at present). I hope I’ll be able to give a thought-provoking talk with plenty of [...]

The detail of everyday interaction

By Dan Lockton ⋅ September 5, 2008 ⋅ 9 comments

Understanding what people really do when they carry out some ’simple’ task, as opposed to what designers assume they do, is important. Even something as mundane as boiling a kettle to make a cup of tea or coffee is fraught with variability, slips, mistaken assumptions and so on, and can be studied in some depth [...]

Discriminatory architecture

By Dan Lockton ⋅ July 4, 2008 ⋅ 6 comments

The entries in B3ta’s current image challenge, ‘Fat Britain’, include this amusing take on anti- $USER_CLASS benches by monkeon.
(There’s also this, using a slightly different discriminatory architecture technique – don’t click if you’re likely to be offended, etc, by B3ta’s style.)

Destroy everything you touch

By Dan Lockton ⋅ November 19, 2007 ⋅ Post a comment

We can’t help but be familiar with the concept of ‘malicious code’ in the context of computer security and programming, but in general the idea of products or technology which, as they’re used, sabotage or degrade the performance of a ‘rival’, is intriguing and not well-explored. Scott Craver’s Underhanded C contest is a fascinating example [...]

Do you really need to print that?

By Dan Lockton ⋅ November 6, 2007 ⋅ 13 comments

This is not difficult to do, once you know how. Of course, it’s not terribly useful, since a) most people don’t read the display on a printer unless an error occurs, or b) you’re only likely to see it once you’ve already sent something to print.
Is this kind of very, very weak persuasion – actually [...]

Detailing and retailing

By Dan Lockton ⋅ August 13, 2007 ⋅ 6 comments

The dazzle painting of HMS Furious, c. 1918. Image from A Gallery of Dazzle-Painted Ships
A couple of weeks ago we looked at casino carpet design – a field where busy, garish graphic design is deliberately employed to repel viewers, and direct their attention somewhere else. Ben Hyde commented that deliberately unattractive “background music, lighting, seating, [...]

Normalising paranoia

By Dan Lockton ⋅ July 27, 2007 ⋅ 12 comments

This is brilliant. Chloë Coulson, Erland Banggren and Ben Williams, three Ravensbourne graduates, have put together a project looking at the “culture of fear”, the media’s use of this, and how it affects our everyday state of mind.
The outcome is a catalogue, WellBeings™ [PDF link] accompanying a specially printed newspaper, The Messenger, designed [...]

Design & Punishment

By Dan Lockton ⋅ July 26, 2007 ⋅ 8 comments

Design and Punishment, by Ben Cunningham. Photo from the Arts Institute at Bournemouth’s 2007 Three Dimensional Design graduate directory.
Very neatly linking the themes of the last two posts (devices to make users aware of their energy use, and intentionally uncomfortable seating) is the Design and Punishment chair by Ben Cunningham, a Three Dimensional Design graduate [...]

(Anti-)public seating roundup

By Dan Lockton ⋅ July 24, 2007 ⋅ 13 comments

Single-occupancy benches in Helsinki. Photo by Ville Tikkanen
Ville Tikkanen of Salient Feature points us to the “asocial design” of these single-person benches installed in Helsinki, Finland. In true Jan Chipchase style, he invites us to think about the affordances offered:
As you can see, the benches are located a few meters away from each other and [...]

More educational architectures of control: museums

By Dan Lockton ⋅ January 30, 2007 ⋅ 4 comments

A ‘traditional’ museum display cabinet in the Kremlin museum, Moscow. I liked the owl.
Two very interesting posts from last week looked at the use of control in museum design – Frankie Roberto discusses trying to get children (in particular) to learn interactively, and Josh Clark has some thoughts on the way that museum and gallery [...]

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Art making a point