Then on Thursday 28th, I’m honoured to be talking as part of a symposium in Loughborough University’s Radar Arts Programme‘s ‘Architectures of Control‘ themed events exploring how our lives are impacted by social and environmental controls.

The symposium is interspersed with the performance of Mark Titchner’s ‘Debating Society and Run’, which sounds intriguing. In the symposium I’ll be talking alongside Professor David Canter, who seems to have had an incredible career ranging from environmental to offender profiling (inspiration for Cracker, etc) and Alexa Hepburn, senior lecturer in Social Psychology at Loughborough. Again, I hope my presentation does justice to the event and other participants! Thanks to Nick Slater for inviting me.

The week after (4th June) I’ll be giving a presentation at UFI in Sheffield, best known for its Learndirect courses. I’m hoping to be able to run a bit of a very rapid idea-generation workshop as part of this talk, something of an ultra-quick trial of the DwI toolkit…

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 to see what’s really going on, or could be going on (e.g. this analysis from 1998 by my co-supervisor, Neville Stanton and Chris Baber). Everyday tasks can be complex.

So I was fascinated and very impressed with Telescopic Text from Joe Davis (found via Kate Andrews‘ eclectically excellent Anamorphosis)

This is very clever stuff – well worth exploring.

As Joe’s meta description for the page says, this is “an exploration of scale and levels of detail. How much or little is contained within the tiniest, most ordinary of moments.” What scripts are embedded here for the user in this system of kettle, mist, mug, stale biscuits?

The dominating level of detail reminds me a bit of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, a novel almost entirely about interaction between people and environments. Or perhaps some of Atrocity Exhibition/Crash-era Ballard, where interactions between people, objects and spaces are broken down endlessly, obsessively.

Back to kettles for a moment: they’re going to feature more heavily on the blog over the next year, in various forms and on many levels. More than almost any other energy-using household product, they’re ripe for the ‘Design for Sustainable Behaviour‘ wand to be waved over them, since almost all the wasted energy (and water) is due to user behaviour rather than technical inefficiency. It’ll be more interesting than it sounds!

(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.)

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 from the ‘white hat’ side of the fence; Microsoft’s use of deliberately targeted style sheets on MSN.com to degrade Opera’s performance is another; and the CIA’s alleged planting of software bugs in Russian pipeline control software is a third. The Sony DRM rootkit might also fall into this category (as would this!)

But on a much more concrete level, we have this playful example: Memoires by Guy Debord, psychogeographer and Situationist, was originally published with a rough sandpaper cover:

Memoires was written, or rather assembled, by Guy Debord and Asger Jorn in 1957. Debord himself often referred to Memoires as an anti-book, and the original edition was bound in sandpaper, that it might destroy other books. The text is entirely composed of fragments taken from other texts: photographs, advertisements, comic strips, poetry, novels, philosophy, pornography, architectural diagrams, newspapers, military histories, wood block engravings, travel books, etc. Each page presents a collage of such materials connected or effaced by Jorn’s structures portantes, lines or amorphous painted shapes that mediate the relationships between the fragments.

(from an article by David Banash)

And from this article by Christian Nolle:

The book is most famous for its sandpaper cover. An auto-destruction feature that enabled it to damage not only the book it might be standing next to in the bookshelf, but also the person who would be reading it. An anti-book to destroy all other books.

Permild writes: “Long had he [Jorn] asked me, if I couldn’t find a unconventional material for the book cover. Preferably some sticky asphalt or perhaps glass wool. Kiddingly, he wanted, that by looking at people, you should be able to tell whether or not they had had the book in their hands. He acquiesced by my [Permild’s] final suggestion: sandpaper (flint) nr. 2: ‘Fine. Can you imagine the result when the book lies on a blank polished mahogany table, or when it’s inserted or taken out of the bookshelf. It plans shavings of the neighbours desert goat [?]’.

In all the literature that I have located, Debord is the person who is refered to as the inventor of the sandpaper cover. However, as it turns out Debord had nothing to do with it… Permild continues, «Asger loved – as he often expressed it, to place small time controlled bombs». This was certainly a bomb. A bomb invented by the printer, whose job is normally of a technical nature. The sandpaper cover was a really good idea, but practically it never managed to practice what it preached. It did, however, make its readers conscious about handling it or where to place it.

One the other hand, Memoires placed itself on a shelf among precious object, something to be handled with great care… The American Hakem Bey did something similar in the 1970s. In homage to Guy Debord, Bey made a book with sandpaper on the inside. This way he rendered the book into auto-destruct mode if you would ever dare to read it. A potential bomb to go off if you would open it. Memoires, on other hand is a bomb, not a potential bomb. No matter how you would handle it, there was always the danger that it could damage your precious collection of 1920s French poetry.

The photos above come from this French eBay listing – the copy on sale reached €3,810.

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 worthwhile? From a user’s point of view, it’s less intrusive than, say, a dialogue box that asks “Are you sure you want to print that? Think of the environment” every time you try to print something (which would become deeply irritating for many users), but when applied thoughtfully, as (in a different area of paper consumption) in Pete Kazanjy’s These Come From Trees initiative, or even in various e-mail footers* (below), there may actually be some worthwhile influence on user behaviour. It’s not ‘micropersuasion’ in Steve Rubel’s sense, exactly, but there is some commonality.

I’m thinking that addressing the choices users make when they decide to print (or not print) a document or email could be an interesting specific example to investigate as part of my research, once I get to the stage of user trials. How effective are the different strategies in actually reducing paper/energy/toner/fuser/ink consumption and waste generation? Would better use of ‘Printer-friendly’ style sheets for webpages save a lot of unnecessary reprints due to cut-off words and broken layouts? Should, say, two pages per sheet become the default when a dicument goes above a certain number of pages? Should users be warned if widows (not so much orphans) are going to increase the number of sheets needed, or should the leading be automatically adjusted (by default) to prevent this? What happens if we make it easier to avoid printing banner ads and other junk? What happens if we make the paper tray smaller so the user is reminded of just how much paper he/she is getting through? What happens if we include a display showing the cost (financially) of the toner/ink, paper and electricity so far each day, or for each user? What happens if we ration paper for each user and allow him or her to ‘trade’ with other users? What happens if we give users a ‘reward’ for reaching targets of reducing printer usage, month-on-month? And so on. (The HP MOPy Fish – cited in B J Fogg’s Persuasive Technology – is an example of the opposite intention: a system designed to encourage users to print more, by rewarding them.)

Printing is an interesting area, since it allows the possibility of testing out both software and hardware tactics for causing behaviour change, which I’m keen to do.

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, and color schemes in large malls” may be used to drive shoppers into the quieter surroundings of the actual stores, which certainly rings true in some cases I can think of.

On another level, though, A comment by Kenshi drew my attention to the dazzle camouflage used in the First World War, which is quite startling, in a brilliantly bold way. Roy R Behrens‘ book, False Colors: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage, from the website of which I’ve borrowed these images, looks extremely interesting, and I will certainly be ordering a copy when I have the budget.

Developed in Britain by Norman Wilkinson and in the US by Everett Warner and Frederic Waugh, the dazzle techniques were intended to make “a single thing appear to be a hodgepodge of unrelated components,” as Behrens puts it in this fascinating article. The aim was that such visual disruption would cause confusion and make it difficult for the enemy to identify what kind of ship – and what size – it was from a distance, with the use of ‘reversed perspective’ in the patterning a part of this. The ship’s course – and angle to the viewer – would also be problematic to identify, with colouring including bright whites, blues and sea-green alongside black, darker blue and grey selectively helping parts of the ship to blend into the seascape, and other parts very much stand out.

Breaking the enemy’s ability to distinguish elements of the ship properly, and generally to cause distraction and make it difficult to concentrate on observation for protracted periods, were all part of this plan; painting ships with different dazzle patterning on each side made identification even harder.

Despite being likened to Cubism disdainfully by some contemporary journalists, the processes used for designing the camouflage were developed both analytically and empirically, and extensively tested before being applied to the real vessels. Nevertheless, there are certainly elements in common between dazzle techniques and parts of Picasso’s and others’ work; Behrens has written further on the interactions between Cubism, Gestalt theory and camouflage (both in nature and man-made).

Left: The Mauritania in dazzle paint camouflage. Right: Those blue and white stripes are familiar to UK shoppers today. Images from A Gallery of Dazzle-Painted Ships

Intriguingly, the right-hand image above, with the bold blue and white stripes, has something in common with an everyday livery familiar to tens of millions of British shoppers: the iconic Tesco Value branding (below), at least in its original form. I’m not suggesting an actual link, but as we will see, there is something in common in the intentions behind these disparate methods of influencing viewer behaviour.

Tesco Value Beans. Image from Plap man on Flickr.

The same Tim Harford article quoted in my recent post about defaults suggests that the “infamously ugly” Tesco Value packaging is intended as a tool to facilitate price discrimination:

The difficulty is that if some of your products are cheap, you may lose money from customers who would willingly have paid more. So, businesses try to discourage their more lavish customers from trading down by making their cheap products look or sound unattractive, or, in the case of Starbucks, making the cheap product invisible. The British supermarket Tesco has a “value” line of products with infamously ugly packaging, not because good designers are unavailable but because the supermarket wants to scare away customers [from the Value products] who would willingly spend more [on other brands, or Tesco's 'normal' private label products].

Whereas the dazzle camouflage was intended to confuse and disconcert the viewer, the thinking behind the Tesco Value graphics (I would love to know who designed the original style) thus appears to be to disconcert or repel certain viewers (customers) so that they pick a higher-priced alternative (usually on the shelf just above the Value items – Tesco’s planograms have thinking behind them), while allowing immediate segmentation – those customers looking for the cheapest products possible find the Value products easily.

There can’t be many retail situations where pretty much the same products can be sold successfully at two different prices on the same shelving unit just because of differing packaging graphics, but it seems to work for Tesco, in the process creating a significant meme.

Left: a ‘Tesco Value’ tattoo, from this B3ta thread There have been many others. Right: Rich Boakes’ ‘Tesco Value’ greetings cards have been widely imitated, and could even have inspired this effort from Asda.

Updates to the Tesco Value branding in recent years have reduced the intensity of the blue stripes and brought the style closer to other supermarkets’ ‘value’ brands, which all tend to be similarly sparse (e.g. Sainsbury’s Basics, below), but the Tesco style is still the most distinctive.

The outcome is a catalogue, WellBeings™ [PDF link] accompanying a specially printed newspaper, The Messenger, designed to be used with special rose-tinted spectacles – simple, yet very clever:

Feeling brave? Read the paper as usual. Feeling fragile? Put on the rose-tinted spectacles to block out the bad news stories which are printed in the same hue as the lenses so it becomes invisible.

The products in the catalogue cater for people made increasingly paranoid by aspects of modern society, by ‘normalising’ paranoia – ranging from H-ear-Phones which allow you to hear what others are saying about you, to Rear-View Mirror spectacles to allow you to keep an eye on who might be following you. As Chloë puts it:

The whole project is about questioning attitudes – should we live in fear – are we safer that way, or should we live for now and not worry about what could happen.

There are also a couple of products in there which are actually defensive weapons – a pepper spray disguised as a perfume atomiser, and house-key-cum-knuckleduster, and these seem to go beyond mere paranoia. All of these products are very plausible, and indeed, some of them are probably commercially viable. Whilst none of these is an architecture of control as such, I felt that they deserved inclusion here – pertinent to the sousveillance discussion, and also the idea of users turning products against instrusive aspects of society, from relatively simple items such as the Knee Defender (prevent the person in front of you on an aircraft reclining his or her seat) to Limor Fried’s Design Noir work on using electronic devices to create social defence mechanisms.

Equally – while perhaps not the focus of the project – the rose-tinted spectacles idea parallels closely the phenomenon of increasing self-selection of the news we expose ourselves to, as the internet and hundreds of TV channels allow segmentation like never before. The idea of a newspaper bringing readers only ‘good’ news has been tried a number of times (a recent example one-off) and has inspired some interesting pieces, but modern media permits many more coloured filters than simply rose-tinting. Clearly, to a large extent, deliberate use of this segmentation can permit intentional reinforcement, entrenchment, even inspiration of certain views and behaviours. Self-selected exposure to propaganda is a curious phenomenon, but one with enormous power.

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 from the Arts Institute at Bournemouth.

Simply, the concept is a chair which progressively collapses as the user’s home energy use becomes excessive, and restores itself when corrective action is taken (such as turning devices off):

Chairs are designed to support a person’s weight: this is taken for granted, but what if that feature were taken away from the user until they have done their bit? This is a way of forcefully highlighting the issue, so they cannot ignore it any more.

The idea is for a range of products with similar ideas – one of Ben’s lecturers, Christian McLening, also mentioned to me the idea of a light cord that retracts gradually the more energy is used, and a bookshelf that similarly tilts gradually. The light cord sounds intriguing, but by making the cord more difficult to reach (to turn it off), it perhaps signifies the opposite of what’s intended. Along the lines of what Crosbie Fitch suggested here, lights which gradually dimmed as the house’s energy consumption increased might be an interesting alternative. But Ben’s aim was very much to play with the ‘punishment’ aspect:

Design and Punishment was, to begin with, a look at designing a product that could make saving energy in the home easier through better awareness. The products force the user to cut down on their energy consumption. Instead of trying to make energy saving easier, the range of products forces the user to save [energy] or suffer a punishment.

Again, the line between forcing the user (physically) to behave in a certain way, and persuading him or her to change behaviour, is not a distinct one; as Toby commented here, both are methods of control, and both are powerful, but in cases such as this where the user would have to choose to purchase the chair voluntarily (Ben’s chair is only a concept product, but the principle stands), the persuasion/coercion would be two/three-pronged: inspiring the purchase in the first place/motivating the user to use it where more convenient alternatives are available, and the actual forcing aspect when the user’s behaviour is changed, rather than the product being abandoned in frustration/annoyance.

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 staring at the same direction. What kind of sociality do particular product and service features afford and what not?

Comments on Ville’s photo on Flickr make it clear that preventing the homeless lying down is seen as one of the reasons behind the design (as we’ve seen in so many other cases).

The street finds its own uses for things. Photo from Stephanie Jenkins

Ted Dewan – the man behind Oxford’s intriguing Roadwitch project, which I will get round to covering at some point – pointed me to a fantastic photo of the vehemently anti-user seating in Oxford’s Cornmarket Street, which was covered on the blog last year. When I saw the seating, no-one was using it (not surprising, though to be fair, it was raining), but the above photo demonstrates very clearly what a pathetic conceit the attempt to restrict users’ sitting down was.

As Ted puts it, these are:

The world’s most expensive, ugly, and deliberately uncomfortable benches… Still, people have managed to figure out how to sit on them, although not the way the ‘designers’ expected. They might as well have written “Oxford wishes you would kindly piss off” on the pavement.

And indeed they were expensive – the set of 8 benches cost £240,000:

Benches in Oxford’s Cornmarket Street will now cost taxpayers £240,000 – and many have been designed to discourage people from sitting on them for a long time… the bill for the benches – dubbed “tombstones” by former Lord Mayor of Oxford Gill Sanders — has hit £240,000.

…

The seats, made of granite, timber and stainless steel, are due to be unveiled next week but shoppers wanting to take the weight off their feet could be disappointed, because they will only be able to sit properly on 24 of the 64 seats. There is a space for a wheelchair in each of the eight blocks, while the other 32 seats are curved and are only meant to be “perched” on for a short time… Mr Cook [Oxford City planning] said the public backed the design when consultation took place two years ago. He added: “There’s method in our madness. We did not want to provide clear, long benches both sides because we did not want drunks lying across them.”

But a city guide said the council had forgotten the purpose of seating. Jane Curran, 56… said: “When people see these seats and how much they cost, they are going to be amazed.

“They look like an interesting design, but seats are for people to sit on… the real function of a seat has been forgotten.”

Mrs Sanders, city councillor for Littlemore, said: “I said time and again that the council should rethink the design, because I don’t think it’s appropriate for Cornmarket. People who need a rest if they’re carrying heavy shopping need to be able to sit down. If they can’t sit on half the seats it’s an incredible waste of money.”

David Robertson, the county executive member for transport, said: “They have been designed so that the homeless will not be able to use them as a bed for the night.”

Matthew Hincman’s ‘bench object’ installed at Jamaica Pond, Boston, Mass. Photo from WBUR website

Following last week’s post on the ‘Lean Seat’, John Curran let me know about the ‘bench object’ installation by sculptor Matthew Hincman. This was installed in a Boston park without any permission from the authorities, removed and then reinstated (for a while, at least) after the Boston Arts Commission and Parks Commission were impressed by the craftsmanship, thoughtfulness and safety of the piece.

While this is probably not Hincman’s intention, the deliberately ‘unsittable’ nature of the piece is not too much beyond some of the thinking we’ve seen displayed with real benches.

Exeter St Davids station – photo by Elsie esq.

In a similar vein to the Heathrow Terminal 5 deliberate lack of-seats except in overpriced cafés, Mags L Halliday also told me about what’s recently happened at Exeter St Davids, her local mainline railway station:

There are no longer any indoor seats available without having to sit in the café, and the toilets are beyond the ticket barrier. So if you’re there waiting for someone off a late train, after the cafe has closed, you can only sit outside the building, and have no access to the toilet facilities (unless a ticket inspector on the barrier feels kind).
…
[First Great Western] are currently doing their best to discourage people from just hanging around waiting at Exeter St Davids. The recent introduction of barriers there (due to massive amounts of fare dodging on the local trains) has created a simply awful space.
…
If you take a look at the stats, FGW has lost over 5% points for customer satisfaction with their facilities in the last 6 months – I wonder why!

Waiting outdoors for late-night trains, with the cold wind howling through the station, is never pleasant anywhere, but I seem to remember St Davids being especially windy (south-south-west to north-north-east orientation). This kind of tactic (removing seats) might not be deliberate, but if it isn’t, it demonstrates a real lack of customer insight or appreciation. Neither reason is admirable.

UPDATE: Mags has posted photos (slideshow) of the recent changes at Exeter St Davids, along with notes – which also show other poor thinking by First Great Western, alongside the obvious removal-of-seating:

Click to see more notes

This is the only seating freely available at Exeter St Davids if you do not have a ticket (i.e. if you are waiting for someone). Note that one of the two benches is delightfully occupied.

Click to see more notes

Exeter St David’s no longer has any freely accessible indoor seating. This is the view of the increasingly encroached concourse area where you can wait for people. The only toilets are beyond the barriers.

Click to see more notes

Having walked into the main concourse, you have to turn 180 degrees in order to see the departures screen, then 180 degrees back to go through the gates.

What an attractive meeting point!

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 visitors can be encouraged to think more about the work on display.

Slipping information into play

Frankie – who works for London’s Science Museum – notes the approach of using interactive games or exhibits with forcing functions to (force?-)feed the user information whilst playing: users are “surreptitiously slipped educational information whilst they’re having fun”:

Museums often try to force visitor behaviour in order to achieve learning outcomes, sometimes more successfully than others. A common example of this is a game – designed to appeal to children – which has factual text embedded within it. The ‘Mobile Mayhem’ game included within our recent Dead Ringers exhibition is a typical example. The gameplay, essentially about pressing the right buttons at the right time, is bookended by some factual paragraphs about mobile phone recycling. By revealing the content word by word, and making the screens unskippable until the whole paragraph has been displayed, the player is meant to be forced to read the text, and hence to take in the new and educational information.

The Mobile Mayhem game, from the Science Museum’s Dead Ringers exhibition website. In the screen shown in the first image, educational text appears word by word, forcing the reader to read it (or at least wait for it to be revealed) before proceeding to the actual game.

The word by word revealing of text is familiar from so many indistinguishable Powerpoint presentations (usually accompanied by that awful typewriter noise, of course), and seeing it used in a ‘control’ context makes me wonder how many speakers/lecturers/managers intentionally (even if subconsciously) reveal their dull text or bullet points word by word so that the audience is forced to stick with the information in the order it’s presented and not read (or think) ahead? I’ve had a few teachers and lecturers in my time who used a bit of paper to cover up parts of OHP transparencies they didn’t want us to read yet, in the hope that we’d pay more attention to what they were saying, and I remember how much that used to irritate me (I like reading ahead!), but I understand why they did it.

Relating back to my recent look at forcing functions in textbooks, Frankie makes the point that:

The problem is, of course, that it’s not that difficult to ignore the education and just focus on the game… it’s pretty impossible for software to actually evaluate educational ‘understanding’, and so attempting to force can be somewhat disingenuous.

[As an aside - and this is something I really should develop in a separate post - there does, equally, come a point where our understanding of how other people understand ideas and concepts makes a one size-fits-all evaluation very difficult. I expect someone has done a study like this (I do hope so - I'd love to read it), but wouldn't it be fascinating to find out whether certain ways of understanding (or visualising) certain concepts help certain people think laterally and draw conclusions that others have missed? For example, this is Richard Feynman, in 'It's as Simple as One, Two, Three':

When I see equations, I see the letters in colors - I don't know why. As I'm talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel functions... with light-tan js, slightly violet-bluish ns and dark brown xs flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students.

I first noted that quote down a few years ago when reading a collection of Feynman's essays, as I'd always had the same kind of very mild grapheme-colour synæsthesia that the quote implies, but I wonder whether the phenomenon actually helped Feynman structure mentally and remember mathematical concepts? And can we learn from it in designing educational systems? Anyway, I'll come back to that idea in a future, more relevant, post!]

Encouraging visitors to think

 
Left: When issued with a booklet explaining artwork on display, many visitors walk around reading this before forming their own impressions of the work. This is an exhibition at Uxbridge’s Beldam Gallery in 2002. Right: Displaying work with no explanatory text, captions or booklets compels visitors to make their own judgments and form their own interpretations of the work (or ignore it, but that’s something of a judgment in itself). This is Dave Cranmer’s Pixelly Paintings at the Foundry, London, in 2002.

Josh’s post argues that many museums and galleries would better fulfil their educational and inspirational potential if they encouraged visitors to think more about what they are looking at, rather than spoon-feeding them information and an ‘established’ opinion – especially pertinent to art:

My wife Ellen is an art historian and a professional museumgoer. She tells me that museum visitors commonly spend more time reading wall texts than looking at the art… It’s a law of interface behavior that users will always follow the path of least resistance. Looking at art is hard. Many find it intimidating, unfamiliar, uncomfortable. It’s easier to read wall text, go shopping or listen to audio commentary than it is to actually face down the work itself.

The interface is broken.

The support materials should be less prominent. What a work “means” or why it’s “important” is second-order information. The important experience is simply to look at the work, to absorb its sensual impact. Respond to it, rather than study it like a schoolbook. For lots of visitors, though, the support materials seem to distract, reducing the time that visitors take to reflect on the works.

The design question: How do you get people to consider the art instead of plunging into its documentation?

As Josh notes, there are designers who think entirely the opposite, and long for more structured lead-ins in galleries, with the artwork’s title and rationale defined clearly up-front. (The always-interesting David Friedman subverts the concept further.)

I can see both points of view. When I was very young I used to get frustrated visiting ‘traditional’ museums that really interested me (mostly motor museums and those with technology) because there was rarely a pre-defined route around them, and I wanted to see everything. When you’re a little kid, zig-zagging across a room from one side to the other to make sure you don’t miss anything out can be difficult, especially when every other visitor is much taller than you and the room seems intimidatingly large. I remember thinking how a museum with displays only along one wall, so that you had to look at them in a certain order, would be good. Now, of course, I would tend to see that as excessive control, and want to be able to miss out things that don’t interest me, and indeed, form my own interpretations of what’s on display.

Josh goes on to give the example of a fairly simple compromise which both allows the visitor to form his or her own interpretations of the work, and to read interpretations if desired:

I think that it would be better to make wall text less prominent, encouraging visitors to spend their time with the art instead.

The modern art museum in Paris, the Centre Pompidou, uses an architecture of control that does just that. Each gallery has a stand with a set of cards offering commentary on the works in the gallery. The wall text is limited only to title, artist and materials. The behavior of museumgoers changes: People walk into the gallery, and spend time with the works. Afterward, those who are curious to learn more go retrieve a card and return to look at the works some more after reading about them.

The educational and background materials are still there, but presented in a way that still encourages people to confront the works first.

It’s interesting that this really does apparently change people’s behavior. (An alternative might be to have more information under a hinged flap on the wall or a pedestal so that only those who want/feel the need to have an established opinion on the piece end up reading it. Or perhaps even the title, artist and materials could be listed under the flap, so that visitors who want to form entirely independent opinions aren’t even swayed by the pieces’ titles or the artists’ names.)

Would you feel cheated if you visited an art gallery and there were no interpretation or explanation of the pieces available at all? Before it became so well-known, how many people picked up The Catcher In the Rye (with its famously sparse blurb-less covers) from a library shelf and put it back, unable to make a commitment to reading it without having an idea what it was about?

Of course, the argument can shift considerably when the subject is a museum dedicated to educating visitors about the exhibits and why they are important, rather than an art gallery, but the principle that Josh outlines of the visitor interfacing (as it were) directly with the exhibit, whether that’s a painting (and the interfacing is figuring out one’s own response to it) or a hands-on science experiment, or anything in between, has a good degree of commonality. The ‘middle man’, the filter of best-fit interpretation drawn up to fit on the standard-size card and fit standard-size opinions, is stripped out.

The Science Museum does a fantastic job of explaining concepts and opening visitors’ eyes to things they actively want to understand, but may never have known how to approach before. It doesn’t tell them how to think about something, but allows them to find out things they didn’t know, and thing more about the things they thought they did know. There is a difference. Bristol’s Exploratory, sadly now closed, was immensely inspirational to me as a child: this was somewhere where all learning was through actual interaction with the (mostly physics-based) exhibits plores.

As we’ve noted before, much of education is about changing behaviour, even if we define the behaviour we want to change as “being ignorant”. Control is one way of attempting to force a change in behaviour, manipulative persuasion is another (thanks Toby) but allowing people to learn because something interests them cuts out the necessity to use force or deceit. If you can make something interesting, you overcome the resistance.

A clever comment on incompatible (and DRM’d) formats by eboy’s flunters. (Via rss.euge.de)

A couple of years ago, after seeing a programme by Jon Ronson, I was reading about the First Earth Battalion and came across a link to an apparently real document, Nonlethal Weapons: Terms and References, edited by Robert J Bunker of the Institute for National Security Studies at the USAF Academy, Colorado. It’s available on the Memory Hole, here.

Amid the various physical, physiological and psychological techniques described (some of which I’ll be looking at in later posts, as they’re pertinent to architectures of control), one section especially stood out – from page 15 of the document:

Now, these are interesting techniques. I don’t know if ‘hologram’ is being used in the right way here, since these sound like simple projections, e.g. onto clouds (or maybe, in the case of the ‘ghost’ appearing next to the drug lord’s bedside, some kind of volumetric display). And whether such projections would really work in terms of scaring or misleading the enemy – who knows?

Have they ever actually been used? Dummy tanks are a well-known way of deceiving an enemy, but would people be taken in by a “projection of the image of an ancient god”? How would they know that what they were seeing was the “ancient god”? If the image used were such a common representation that it was instantly recognisable, wouldn’t it seem obviously fake? Or would any giant figure looming over a city scare people sufficiently, whether or not they realised what it was supposed to represent? (It’s been suggested that the Angels of Mons, if they existed, may have been “images of angels that the Germans had projected onto the clouds at the outbreak of the battle in order to try and scare the troops on the opposite side…But apparently this idea had backfired, in that the troops had seen these images and believed them to be St George, Joan of Arc, actually leading them against the Germans.”)

The projection of “soldier-force images” has more credibility. Odd atmospheric effects seem to be the explanation behind the various reflected “cities in the sky” that have occasionally been seen: taking this further, it is surely possible to create a mirage-like effect of a massed army to intimidate an enemy.

So, outside of the military context, is there potential for this kind of false image to be used to manipulate and control the public? Not obviously, perhaps, but as the police in many countries become increasingly militarised in outlook (particularly in “security” situations), would the tactic of projecting images of massed officers (maybe with riot shields covering their faces, to make extensive detail less necessary) be considered? Cardboard cutout police cars are occasionally used to scare motorists, as are fake speed cameras (often placed by members of the public) and, of course, fake CCTV cameras.

It also makes me wonder what the legality is of members of the public projecting images onto buildings, clouds, etc. Much of this so far has been done for promotional reasons – e.g. FHM‘s projection of Gail Porter onto the Houses of Parliament – or a technology college in Surrey, the day after A-level results:

“While projection on to a building is not illegal as such, you will be asked to move on by the police because laser projection is viewed as a distraction to drivers and hence a hazard,” says Dominic Bean, formerly head of marketing and business Development at NESCOT. He used projections to promote North East Surrey College of Technology and found that the response from the authorities was far from harsh. “Policemen on Epsom Downs (ten miles away from the projection site) spotted our projection on to Tolworth Towers – near the A3 in Surrey,” says Bean. “It took them nearly 50 minutes to drive over and ask for the image to be removed. They were amazed to see it, and saw the ‘fun’ side.

Guerrilla ‘photon bombing’ or ‘projection bombing’ clearly has a lot of potential for allowing members of the public, activists and counterculture groups to promote their messages, but so far doesn’t appear to have been used for truly subversive ends on a large scale. There is some very clever work going on in this field, such as Troika’s SMS Guerilla Projector, but imagine a politician’s press conference where giant images of his opponent or opposing slogans are projected behind him, or a televised sports event where logos of the sponsor’s rivals are projected (by someone in the crowd) onto the faces of players being shown in close-up. It may have already happened; if not, it won’t be long before it does.

*I was reminded of this subject the other day by hearing a caller on Danny Baker‘s radio show, who commented that the shadow of a crane outside his window resembled “the shadow of a giant demon towering over London”.

See also the ‘scariest picture in the world’, from Look Around You.

Image from Monkeys & Kiwis (Flickr)

Chris Weightman let me know about how it felt to watch last Thursday’s iPod Flashmob at London’s Liverpool Street station: the dominant sense was of a mass of people overturning the ‘prescribed’ behaviour designed into an environment, and turning the area into their own canvas, overlaying individualised, externally silent experiences on the usual commuter traffic.

Probably wouldn’t get away with that sort of thing at an airport any more anyway, but what will happen to this kind of informal gathering in the era of the societies of control? When everyware monitors exactly who’s where and forces the barriers closed for anyone hoping to use the space for something other than that for which it was intended?

Images from Yumiko Hayakawa

Yumiko Hayakawa has a very thoughtful and well-illustrated article at OhMyNews on the story behind the variety of ‘anti-homeless’ benches and architectural features (including public art) in Tokyo’s parks and public areas – by making it difficult or impossible to lie down. (We’ve looked briefly before at benches with central armrests before, along with anti-sit devices and of course anti-skateboarding measures – ‘disciplinary architecture‘)

Many of the features, such as the benches shown above and below, are also designed to discourage everyone from spending too long on them, even when sitting normally, by deliberately making them uncomfortable:

“The bench in the photo below may appear to be of modern design, but because of its tubular construction one risks sliding off if not careful.

One should be especially careful if drunk at the time! Made of stainless steel, the benches are hot in summer and cold in winter. The Toshima-ward parks office, which oversees Ikebukuro West Park, home to this bench, describes the bench as “designed to keep with the modern image of the area while at the same time not allowing homeless people to loiter.”

Suggestions that the benches were dangerously slippery and also uncomfortable met with the advice that “people should take the utmost care when sitting on them” and that these benches were only something to lean on or sit on for a few minutes.

That is, they want us to regard the bench as “somewhere you can sit if you have to.” It makes you wonder who would actually want to sit on such a bench.”

There are examples of bus stop ‘perches’ and uncomfortable café seating to discourage loitering from many areas of the world, but it does seem as though Tokyo’s authorities perhaps see inconveniencing all members of the public as merely collateral damage in a ‘war’ against the homeless, which itself is more than simply contentious. Nevertheless, people adapt and find their own ways around discipline. Hayakawa interviewed some homeless people about the benches:

“Most common were the “defeatists,” who gave up on the grounds that the benches were so uncomfortable that it was easier to just lay down a newspaper and sit on the ground. Next most common were the “optimists,” who argued that while they found it a hassle to be unable to sit on benches for a long period of time, it did mean that other park users had to put up with seeing homeless people less. Finally, there were the
“innovators,” who would lie folding their bodies into a V-shape around the central bench divider, or placing bags on either sides of the divider at the same height, or even placing a camping stove underneath the stainless steel tubular bench above to cook and at the same time warm the bench!”

“Do artefacts have politics?” Langdon Winner asked in 1986; the answer is, of course, yes.

The BBC is reporting that the All Party Internet Group (APIG), a cross-party group of MPs, has made some intelligent – and interesting – recommendations about explaining DRM more fully to consumers:

“The MPs’ report made several recommendations and called on the Office of Fair Trading hasten the introduction of labelling regulations that would let people know what they can do with music and movies they buy online or offline.

This would ensure that it was “crystal clear” to consumers what freedom they have to use the content they are purchasing and what would happen if they do something outlawed by the protection system.

The same labelling systems would also spell out what happened in the event of a maker of DRM technology going bust, if a protection system became obsolete or if gadgets to play the content are replaced.

…

The report also called for the makers of DRM systems to be made aware of the consequences of using aggressive copy protection systems [e.g. the Sony-BMG nightmare].”

I wonder what the proposed labelling system will entail? Will it be very simple, or will it need to spell out to consumers the rights the law gives them in order to them point out how this particular DRM’d CD or download is restricting them?

In short, do we need a programme of educating consumers about their rights before a labelling system will be useful?

The Open Rights Group‘s Suw Charman is quoted in the BBC story:

“”The technologies are extending beyond the law they are supposed to uphold.”

…

She said that DRM was less about protecting copyright and more about creating a system in which people rent rather than own the media they spend money on.

“We think people rightly feel that once they buy something, it stays bought,” she said.”

APIG’s group secretary is the Earl of Erroll, an insightful quote of whose I blogged about a few months ago. It’s worth repeating in this context, as APIG’s work here goes some way to remedying the problem he highlights:

“If no members of either house know anything about IT, then bureaucrats will take control of our lives, or pretend they can do things they can’t.”

Hopefully APIG can continue their work in educating politicians, as well as the public, about the implications of restrictive technology.

*Not owning any DRM’d music, I used a recent CD purchase, the excellent Great Days of Sail (now Yo Zushi) album, for the mockup image. An alternative style of label might be those distributed by Downhill Battle and RIAA Radar:

Image from Downhill Battle.

A lot of people find this site through searching for something along the lines of ‘Mosquito high frequency anti-teenager ringtone’, and are presumably disappointed when they find that there is no such ringtone to download, even if just because they’d like to test it on friends and family. (More on the Mosquito device) There’s also the more possibility of course of using the ringtone as a kind of ‘secret ringtone’ that, supposedly, only younger people can hear, so you can receive text messages, etc, e.g. while in class, without adults noticing, though I’d have thought that was partially the point of the vibrate mode.

Anyway, I thought I might as well give those searching what they’re looking for, sort of.

EDIT (31.v.2006) : I’ve got rid of the mp3s, because even encoded with the LAME ‘insane’ (320kbps) preset, the sound was too different from the purer tone of the wave files. The whole point about mp3 as a lossy compression format is that it reduces the percentage of high frequencies that are (normally) less audible to humans: i.e., the high frequencies which are the whole point of this exercise are given much lower weighting.

30 second, 2.6 Mb wave files (produced using Audacity) are now available again, hosted at the Internet Archive (thanks for the tip, Andreas):

The above three files are hereby placed in the public domain.

Here too is a link to a BBC page where you can hear (and download) a 256kbps mp3 of the actual Mosquito sound – www.bbc.co.uk/wiltshire/…shtml.

I suppose MIDI files of the tones would be better: if anyone can supply these, this would be great.

Equally, I don’t know if the speakers in a typical mobile phone are set up to respond to frequencies in this range properly, so it may be that even the wave files will be useless when played using a phone.

Note: I’m only 23, but none of the above sound files sounds especially irritating to me (though my sound card and speakers may not be giving me the full effect that the Mosquito device itself would. I can hear the 20 kHz fine and it certainly wouldn’t drive me away: it’s similar to the hum an older TV or CRT might make.

EDIT (15.vi.2006 am) : This post is now fifth result in Google (UK) for ringtone download – wow! If only a few people would click on some of the ads, I might actually make a few quid…

EDIT (15.vi.2006 pm) : Wow, that dropped out quickly! By this afternoon the site wasn’t even in the first 10 pages of results…