In a meta-auto-behaviour-change effort both to keep me motivated during a very protracted PhD write-up and demonstrate that the end is in sight, I’m going to be publishing a few extracts from my thesis (mostly from the literature review, and before any rigorous editing) as blog posts over the next few weeks. It would be nice to think they might also be interesting brief articles in their own right, but the style is not necessarily blog-like, and some of the graphics and tables are ugly.

“It is now clear that we must take into account what the environment does to an organism not only before but after it responds. Behaviour is shaped and maintained by its consequences… It is true that man’s genetic endowment can be changed only very slowly, but changes in the environment of the individual have quick and dramatic effects.”
B.F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, 1971, p.24

Behaviourism as a psychological approach is based on empirical observation of human (and animal) behaviour—stimuli in the environment, and the behavioural responses which follow—and attempts in turn to apply stimuli to provoke desired responses. John B. Watson (1913, p.158), in laying out the behaviourist viewpoint, reacted against the then-current focus by Freud and others on unobservable concepts such as the processes of the mind: “Psychology as the behaviorist views it… [has as its] theoretical goal…the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness”.

Classical and operant conditioning

In an engineering sense, Watson’s behaviourism perhaps treats animals and humans as black boxes* (Sparks, 1982), whose truth tables can be elicited by comparing inputs (stimuli) and outputs (responses), without any attempt to model the internal logic of the system—an approach which Chomsky (1971) criticises. As Koestler (1967, p.19) put it—also heavily criticising the behaviourist view—“[s]ince all mental events are private events which cannot be observed by others, and which can only be made public through statements based on introspection, they had to be excluded from the domain of science.” However, learning (via conditioning) is inherent to behaviourism—both Watson’s and the later perspective of Skinner—which means that the black box is somewhat more complex than a component with fixed behaviour. Classical or respondent conditioning, of the kind explored with dogs by Pavlov (1927)—and often applied in behaviour change methods such as aversion therapy (as for example, the ‘Ludovico technique’ in Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange (1962))—repeatedly pairs two stimuli so that the reflex behaviour provoked by one also becomes provoked by the other.

Operant conditioning, as developed by B.F. Skinner (1953) via famous experiments with pigeons, rats and other animals, is essentially about consequences: it involves reinforcing (or punishing) certain behaviours (the operant) so that the animal (or person) becomes conditioned to behave in a particular way:

“When a bit of behaviour is followed by a certain kind of consequence, it is more likely to occur again, and a consequence having this effect is called a reinforcer. Food, for example, is a reinforcer to a hungry organism; anything the organism does that is followed by the receipt of food is more likely to be done again whenever the organism is hungry. Some stimuli are called negative reinforcers: any response which reduces the intensity of such a stimulus—or ends it—is more likely to be emitted when the stimulus recurs. Thus, if a person escapes from a hot sun when he moves under cover, he is more likely to move under cover when the sun is again hot.” (Skinner, 1971, p.31-32)

It is important to note here that in Skinner’s terms, positive and negative reinforcement do not imply ‘good’ and ‘bad’, and negative reinforcement is a different concept to punishment. Positive reinforcement is giving a reward in return for particular behaviour; negative reinforcement is removing something unpleasant in return for particular behaviour. These are subtly different. Pryor (2002) gives the example of a car seatbelt warning buzzer as negative reinforcement—a device designed to be irritating or unpleasant enough to cause the user to take action to avoid it. We might consider that a recorded voice saying “Thank you” after the seatbelt is fastened could be a positive reinforcement alternative. Positive and negative punishment are essentially the inverse of each of these—a fine for not wearing a seatbelt while driving is a form of positive punishment, and taking away someone’s driving licence would be a form of negative punishment. Clicker training with animals such as dolphins and dogs (e.g. Pryor, 2002) arguably combines features of classical and operant conditioning, using an audible clicking device to help ‘mark’ particular behaviours immediately they occur, which can then be positively reinforced with treats—or the click itself can act as a reinforcer.

A major factor in operant conditioning is the schedule of reinforcement that occurs: variable schedules of reinforcement, where a reward occurs on an unpredictable schedule—either ratio (amount of behaviour required) or interval (time required)—can be particularly effective; as Skinner (1971, p. 39) notes, variable ratio scheduling is “at the heart of all gambling systems”. Pryor (2002, p. 22) comments that “[p]eople like to play slot machines precisely because there’s no predicting whether nothing will come out, or a little money, or a lot of money, or which time the reinforcer will come (it might be the very first time).” This principle is inherent in all games of chance—Schell (2008, p.153) recognises it as something a designer can work with explicitly: “a good game designer must become the master of chance and probability, sculpting it to his will, to create an experience that is always full of challenging decisions and interesting surprises.”

*A ‘black box’ approach to modelling human, animal and other system behaviour has also been discussed extensively within cybernetics, e.g. by Ashby (1956) and Bateson (1969).

Social traps

“Like their physical analogs, social traps are baited. The baits are the positive rewards which, through the mechanisms of learning, direct behavior along lines that seem right every step of the way but nevertheless end up at the wrong place. Complex patterns of reinforcement, motivation, and the structure of social situations can draw people into unpreferred modes of behavior, subjecting them to consequences that are not comprehended until it is too late to avoid them.”
Cross and Guyer, Social Traps, 1980, p.16-17

Platt (1973) and Cross and Guyer (1980) discuss ‘social traps’, situations in which there is both reinforcement which encourages a behaviour, but also a punishment or unpleasant consequences of some kind, affecting either the person involved or someone else, at some later point or in some other way. “The behavior that receives the green light becomes supplanted by or is accompanied by an unavoidable punishment…[C]igarette smoking provides a simple example: the gratification associated with smoking encourages future behavior of the same kind, while the painful illness associated with that same behavior does not occur until a point very distant in the future; and when, finally, the illness does occur, no behavioral adjustments exist that are sufficient to avoid it” (p.11-12). There are perhaps parallels with Bateson’s concept of the double bind (Bateson et al, 1956), in which a person is subject to conflicting ‘injunctions’ (reinforcers or punishments) about what ‘right’ behaviour is, with the result that whatever he or she does, will be wrong (and perhaps punished) according to one of the injunctions.

Countertraps—what Platt (1973) suggests might be called ‘social fences’—also exist, where people avoid a behaviour because of (fear of) punishment or undesirable consequences, even though the behaviour would have been desirable. Often the reinforcer is a short-term, local gain, whereas the punishment is a longer-term effect, perhaps affecting a wider group or area: Platt cites Hardin’s tragedy of the commons (1968) as a well-known example of social trap with worldwide social and environmental consequences. Costanza (1987) examines how different kinds of social traps are responsible for a range of environmental problems.

Cross and Guyer’s (1980) taxonomy of social traps is potentially interesting for two reasons from a design perspective, since (in common with some of the cognitive biases and heuristics to be discussed in a later post), design could seek to help users avoid such traps, by redesigning situations to avoid them (hence influencing behaviour), or in some way exploit the effects to influence behaviour, if they are useful in some other way. In Cross and Guyer’s taxonomy, there are five classes of trap (including countertraps), together with a ‘hybrid’ category for traps comprising more than one of the others: time-delay traps, where the time lag between a behaviour and a reinforcer is too high for it to be effective, e.g. “the high school dropout who, avoiding the present pain and unpleasantness of school, finds himself later lacking the education which could have prepared him for a more rewarding job” (p.21); ignorance traps, in which people fail to make use of generally available knowledge when making a decision, but simply rely on immediate reinforcers or superstitions; sliding reinforcer traps, “patterns of behavior [which] continue long after the circumstances under which that behavior was appropriate have ceased to be relevant, producing negative consequences that would have been avoided easily had the behavior stopped earlier… The trap occurs because the rewards establish a habit which persists in the succeeding period” (p.25); externality traps, where “the reinforcements that are relevant to the first individual may not coincide with the returns received by the second… If Peter spends five minutes in a cafeteria line choosing his dessert, he does not suffer for it, but all the people waiting behind him certainly do” (p. 28); and collective traps, which involve tragedy-of-the-commons-type externality traps, involving reinforcers or consequences for multiple participants based on behaviour by one or more.

Cross and Guyer (1980, p.35) suggest ‘ways out’ of the traps, including their ‘conversion’ into trade-offs, “presenting the individual with a set of reinforcers that occur in close proximity to the behavior in question and which closely match the actual reward and punishment patterns that underly [sic.] the situation. The trap then becomes a simple choice situation in which rational and learned behavior are coincident. In some cases—particularly those of time-delay traps—this might be accomplished simply by altering the timing of reinforcers somehow bringing the punishment or proxy for the punishment into closer proximity with its causative behavior.” This could well be the principle behind a design approach to removing social traps, although it relies on being able to determine the structure of reinforcers and punishments which are affecting current behaviour, and somehow redesigning them accordingly.

Means and ends

Studer (1970, p.114-6) discussed applying operant conditioning principles to the design of environments (such as buildings), by treating them as “learning systems arranged to bring about and maintain specified behavioral topographies…What operant findings suggest, among other things, is that events which have traditionally been regarded as the ends in the design process, e.g., pleasant, exciting, comfortable, the participant’s likes and dislikes, should be reclassified. They are not ends at all, but valuable means, which should be skillfully ordered to direct a more appropriate over-all behavioral texture.”

Reconsidering means and ends in this way may provide a useful alternative perspective on design for behaviour change. What may be an end from the user’s perspective (some kind of reward for turning off unnecessary equipment, perhaps) effectively becomes the means by which the designer’s end (the user turns off unnecessary equipment) might be influenced. The designer’s intended end is the user’s means for achieving the user’s intended end (Figure 1). If the end the user desires can be aligned with the means available to the designer, then the behaviour is reinforced. The mapping between ends and means (in both directions) may not seem to be one-to-one on first inspection. For example, the user’s end probably reflects an underlying need—not examined further in a behaviourist context—and likewise with the designer’s end. ‘Receiving feedback on my energy use in the office’—a favourite designer’s means for influencing reduced energy use—is probably rarely expressed as a desired end from a user’s point of view, but if successful at reinforcing conservation behaviour, it presumably fulfils some underlying psychological needs.

Figure 1. The designer’s end and user’s means may be seen as reflections of each other, and likewise with the designer’s means and user’s end. Based on ideas from Studer (1970).

As an informal warm-up exercise in a workshop run at the Persuasive 2010 conference in Copenhagen, the author asked participants (designers and others involved with planning persuasive technology interventions) to map some intended ends relating to socially beneficial behaviour change, and some of the means they could think of to achieve them (Figure 2), using the labels ‘People will do this…’ and ‘…if our design does this’ for ends and means respectively.

Viewing the designer’s means from the user’s point of view, as an end, sometimes involves the end being avoiding something rather than receiving something—i.e. negative reinforcement. It is debatable whether this has much value beyond being simply a warm-up exercise, but it does encourage designers to think about trying to align the ends desired by the user with the means available to the designer. Weinschenk (2011, p.120), in appealing to (mainly web) designers to consider operant conditioning as a strategy for influencing behaviour, asks, “Hungry rats want food pellets. What does your particular audience really want?”

Figure 2. Some means-end pairings suggested by workshop participants in Copenhagen.

Impact of behaviourism

Despite many of behaviourism’s principles having been adopted in other fields—not just animal training but therapeutic applications (e.g. with autism), athletic training, programmed learning via ‘teaching machines’ (e.g. Kay et al, 1968), to the emerging self-help industry (Rutherford, 2009)—it was largely supplanted in the mainstream of academic psychology by the ‘cognitive revolution’ (e.g. Crowther-Heyck, 2005), re-emphasising cognition as something to be understood as a determinant of behaviour. Pask (1969, p.21) refers to “the arid conflict between behaviourism and mentalism,” while Ericsson and Simon (1985, p.1) suggest that “[a]fter a long period of time during which stimulus-response relations were at the focus of attention, research in psychology is now seeking to understand in detail the mechanisms and internal structure of cognitive processes that produce these relations.” Images of Skinner-like scientist figures peering at rats pressing levers to obtain food, with the implication that this was what was proposed for humanity, to some extent cast a shadow of ‘the psychologist as manipulator’ over subsequent work on behaviour change—as Pryor (2002, p. xiii) notes, “to people schooled in the humanistic tradition, the manipulation of human behavior by some sort of conscious technique seems incorrigibly wicked.” Winter and Koger (2004, p.116) suggest that “[s]inister motives are attributed to those who would implement behavioral technology, and Skinner himself has been badly misrepresented and misunderstood as a cold, cruel scientist”.

Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), which proposed a new society—“the design of a culture” based on a scientifically refined “technology of behaviour” reinforcing only behaviours which were beneficial to humanity, many of which were essentially about ensuring environmental sustainability—was widely read as promoting a totalitarian future. Chomsky (1971) suggested that “there is nothing in Skinner’s approach that is incompatible with a police state in which rigid laws are enforced by people who are themselves subject to them and the threat of dire punishment hangs over all,” and this view persists, although Skinner eschews the use of punishment in favour of reinforcement. Slater (2004, p. 28) argues that “Skinner is asking society to fashion cues that are likely to draw on our best selves, as opposed to cues that clearly confound us, cues such as those that exist in prisons, in places of poverty. In other words, stop punishing. Stop humiliating. Who could argue with that?”

In a later work, Skinner (1986) offers an explicit ‘design for sustainable behaviour’ view of the possibilities of intelligent use of operant conditioning:

“[W]e have the science needed to design a world…in which people treated each other well, not because of sanctions imposed by governments or religions but because of immediate, face-to-face consequences. It would be a world in which people produced the goods they needed, not because of contingencies arranged by a business or industry but simply because they were “goods” and hence directly reinforcing. It would be a beautiful and interesting world because making it so would be reinforced by beautiful and interesting things… It would be a world in which the social and commercial practices that promote unnecessary consumption and pollution had been abolished… A designed way of life would be liked by those who lived it (or the design would be faulty).” (Skinner, 1986, p. 11-12)

Rutherford (2009, p.102) notes that Skinner himself designed and “constructed a variety of gadgets and devices that allowed him to control his environment, and thus his behavior. For example for many years Skinner rose early to write, often going directly from his bed to his desk. He would then switch on his desk lamp, which was connected to a timer. When his writing time was up, the timer would switch off his desk lamp, signaling the end of the writing period… For Skinner, setting up environmental contingencies for personal self-management was a natural outcome of behavior analysis.”

Regardless of the position of behaviourism in current academic psychological discourse, there are certainly elements which are relevant to design for behaviour change; indeed, the principles of reinforcement can be seen at work underneath many designed interventions even if they are not explicitly recognised as such. As Skinner (1971) argued (see quote opening this section), the environment shapes our behaviour both before and after we take actions, antecedent and consequence (even the absence of a perceived consequence is a consequence, in this sense). This is an important point, since much work in behaviour change focuses on one or the other. A system designed to suggest or cue particular behaviours, and then reward or acknowledge them, covers both intervention points, particularly given the fact that much interaction with products and systems is part of a regular schedule, and users do learn how to operate things through an ongoing cycle of reinforcement: behaviour change does not necessarily happen in a single step. The concept of variable or unpredictable reinforcement has potential design application in situations where a reward cannot be given every time, and also (as noted by Schell (2008)) in the design of games and game-like features in other interactions. The idea of shaping behaviour towards an intended state through progressive rewards for improvements in behaviour rather than every time has relevance in changing habits, which can be important in (for example) establishing exercise and healthier eating routines.

Winter and Koger (2004, p.118) propose what a behaviourist approach to a sustainable society might involve in relation to influencing more environmentally friendly transport choices, which suggests a mixture of different kinds of reinforcement designed into the system: “All the cues encouraging driving alone would be gone. Nobody would be climbing into a car alone, cars would be expensive to operate and roads would be less convenient. People would live within walking or biking distance to their workplace, commute in groups, or use public transportation… Schools and shops would be arranged close by, allowing people to complete errands without the use of a car… We wouldn’t try to change out of moral responsibility or pro-environment attitudes. We would emit environmentally appropriate behaviors because the environment had been designed to support them.”

Implications for designers

▶ Behaviourism is no longer mainstream psychology, but some of the principles could have potential application in design for behaviour change

▶ There is a recognition that the environment shapes our behaviour both before and after we take actions—a useful insight for designing interventions

▶ There is also a recognition that behaviour change does not necessarily happen in a single step, but as part of an ongoing cycle of shaping

▶ Where cognition cannot be understood or examined, modelling users in terms of stimuli and responses may still offer valuable insights

▶ Positive and negative reinforcement, and positive and negative punishment can all be implemented via designed features, and often underlie designed interventions without being explicitly named as such

▶ Schedules of reinforcement can be varied (e.g. made unpredictable) to drive continued behaviour

▶ Design could either exploit or help people avoid ‘social traps’ where both reinforcement and punishment exist, or reinforcement is currently misaligned with the behaviour, converting them into ‘trade-offs’ which more closely match the intended behavioural choices

▶ Considering means and ends may provide a useful perspective on design for behaviour change. The end from the user’s perspective effectively becomes the means by which the designer’s end might be influenced

References

Ashby, W.R. (1956) An Introduction to Cybernetics. Chapman & Hall, London
Bateson, G., Jackson, D.D., Haley, J. and Weakland, J.H. (1956) Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia. Behavioral Science I(4)
Bateson, G. (1969) Metalogue: What Is an Instinct? In Bateson, G. (1969) Steps to an Ecology of Mind. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Burgess, A. (1962) A Clockwork Orange. Heinemann, London
Chomsky, N. (1971) The Case Against B.F. Skinner. The New York Review of Books, 30 Dec 1971
Costanza, R. (1987) Social traps and environmental policy. Bioscience 37(6)
Cross, J.G. and Guyer, M.J. (1980) Social Traps. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor
Crowther-Heyck, H. (2005) Herbert A. Simon: The Bounds of Reason in Modern America. Johns Hopkins University Press
Ericsson, K.A. and Simon, H.A. (1985) Protocol Analysis: Verbal Reports as Data. MIT Press
Hardin, G. (1968) The Tragedy of the Commons. Science 162.
Kay, H., Dodd, B. and Sime, M.E. (1968) Teaching Machines and Programmed Instruction. Penguin
Koestler, A. (1967) The Ghost in the Machine.
Pask (1969) The meaning of cybernetics in the behavioural sciences (The cybernetics of behaviour and cognition; extending the meaning of “goal”). In Rose, J. (ed.) (1969) Progress of Cybernetics, Volume 1. Gordon and Breach
Pavlov, I. (1927) Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex. Translated by Anrep, G.V. Oxford University Press
Platt, J. (1973) Social Traps. American Psychologist, 28
Pryor, K. (2002) Don’t Shoot the Dog: The New Art of Teaching and Training. Interpet
Rutherford, A. (2009) Beyond the Box: B.F. Skinner’s Technology of Behavior from Laboratory to Life, 1950s-1970s. University of Toronto Press
Schell, J. (2008) The Art of Game Design. Morgan Kaufmann
Skinner, B.F. (1953) Science and Human Behavior. The Free Press, New York.
Skinner, B.F. (1971) Beyond Freedom and Dignity.
Skinner, B.F. (1986) Why we are not acting to save the world. In Skinner, B.F. Upon further reflection. Prentice-Hall
Slater, L. (2004) Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychology Experiments of the Twentieth Century. Bloomsbury
Sparks, J. (1982) The Discovery of Animal Behaviour. Collins.
Studer, R.G. (1970) The Organization of Spatial Stimuli. In Pastalan, L.A. and Carson, D.H. (eds.), Spatial Behavior of Older People. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor
Watson, J.B. (1913) Psychology as the behaviorist views it. Psychological Review, 20
Weinschenk, S (2011) 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People. New Riders
Winter D. du N. and Koger, S.M. (2004) The Psychology of Environmental Problems. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates

B.F. Skinner photo from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/bhskin.html
Banksy Rat photo from DG Jones on Flickr, licensed under CC-BY-NC

Thanks too to all the people who’ve blogged about it, included it in a podcast, and spread it via Twitter. Your attention’s much appreciated and if anyone does try it out on some problems, please do let me know how you get on, what would improve it, and so on. And more examples for each of the patterns are, of course, always welcome!

Printed copies (A2 poster, 135gsm silk finish) are available – the nominal listing on Amazon is £15 including postage, but if you’d like one for much less than that, let me know! (In fact, if you’re willing to try it out on a design problem, fill in a survey about how you did it, and let me use it as a brief case study, you can have it free.)

Persuasive 2009

I say I’m just coming up for air briefly, as for the last couple of weeks, among some other major work (which could possibly bear some very nice fruit), I’ve been putting together my presentation* for Persuasive 2009, the Fourth International Conference on Persuasive Technology in Claremont, California, next week, and at present am desperately trying to finish a lot of other things before flying out on Saturday. It’ll be my first time across the Atlantic and my girlfriend and I will be having a bit of a holiday afterwards, so I hope a lack of updates and replies, while little different to my usual pattern, will be excusable. But while the conference is on, if there’s time and no hoo-hah with the wireless and it seems appropriate, I’ll try and do a bit of blogging, or more likely, Twittering about it (#persuasive2009 ?). There are some very interesting people presenting their work.

Anyway, if you missed the update to my earlier post, a preprint version of my paper (with David Harrison, Tim Holley and Neville A. Stanton), Influencing Interaction: Development of the Design with Intent Method [PDF, 1.6MB] is available. At some point soon this version of the paper will downloadable from Brunel’s research archive, while the ‘proper’ version will be available in the ACM Digital Library. ACM requires me to state the following alongside the link to the preprint:

© ACM, 2009. This is the authors’ version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version will be published in Proceedings of Persuasive 2009: Fourth International Conference on Persuasive Technology, Claremont, CA, 26-29 April 2009, ACM Digital Library. ISBN 978-1-60558-376-1.

The presentation will include many parts of the paper, but the nature of academic papers like this (submitted in December) is that they are out of date before anyone reads them. So, much of the presentation will be about the DwI toolkit and the reasoning behind bits of it, rather than just sticking to the state of the research six months ago – I hope that’s reasonable. Last year, presenting on the last day of the conference meant that I was able to spend many hours in a hotel room in Oulu editing and re-editing the presentation (mostly listening to the Incredible Bongo Band’s version of In-a-Gadda-da-Vida on repeat) to match what I thought the audience would like, and incorporate things I’d learned during the conference, but this time I’m on the first day so there isn’t that opportunity…

Interfaces article

Also this month, I have a brief article about my research in Interfaces, the magazine of Interaction, the British Computer Society’s HCI Group, in its ‘My PhD’ series (p. 20-21). Interfaces no. 78 is available to download here (make sure to click on the link below the cover image, as – at time of writing – the cover’s linked to the previous issue). It’s a great magazine – redesigned for this issue – with some really interesting features about aspects of HCI by some well-known names in the field. Thanks to Eduardo Calvillo and Stephen Hassard for making the article possible.

The table in the article was unfortunately truncated during editing so (if I get it in in time) there’ll be a brief addendum in the next issue with the full table, but I might as well make it available here too [PDF, 8kb] – it’s a brief, not especially exciting summary of some concepts for influencing householders to close curtains at night to save energy. (At some point I’ll do a full case study on this as there are some interesting ideas as well as some very impractical ones.)

*Taking Parkinson’s Law as an instruction manual seems to be a perpetual habit of mine, so the maximum time allocated to get the presentation done has been more than entirely taken up by getting the presentation done… it’s still not quite there, and I’m not sure whether the format of the auditorium’s going to allow an interactive element which I would very much like to include but probably won’t be able to. Also – while Prezi looks like it might be everything I’ve ever wanted in presentation software – the workflow of “doing a PowerPoint” for me has evolved into a long chain of “Photoshop – Illustrator – export – Photoshop – Save for Web – insert into PowerPoint” which I’m sure I could do more quickly, but lots of conferences and seminars want PPTs rather than PDFs, and the only Mac I have (which once – kind of – belonged to the Duke of Edinburgh [interesting story]) is too slow and old to run anything better.

It’s been a long time since I last wrote an Instructable, but as I’ve resolved that 2009′s going to be a year where I start making things again (2008 involved a lot of sitting, reading and annotating, and in 2007 most of what I made was for clients, and thus confidential), I thought I’d write up a brief (10 minute) fun little bodgey project which has, very marginally, boosted everyday productivity: the One-Touch Keypad Masher.

Wasting valuable seconds typing in a code every time you need to open the door?

This little ‘device’ streamlines the process by pressing the right keys for you, and can be hidden in your palm so you simply mash your hand against the keypad and – apparently miraculously to anyone watching – unlock the door in one go.

Time to make: Less than 10 minutes
Time saved: About 30 seconds per day in my case; your mileage may vary.
Payback time: 20 days, in this case

(There’s a (weak) correlation with some of the Design with Intent topics, since it could be seen as a device which allows a user to interact with a “What you know” security measure using a “What you have” method. At some point in the near future I’ll be covering these on the blog as design patterns for influencing behaviour.

It’s also a kind of errorproofing device, a poka-yoke employing specialised affordances. If used, it prevents the user mistyping the code.)

The Instructable is also embedded below (Flash), but for whatever reason there are a few formatting oddities (including hyperlinks being ignored) so it’s easier to read in the original.

This is a kind of exploration of some ideas I worked on a while ago as part of my research, and have only just come back to, in order to tidy them up a bit. I’m putting it online as a way – perhaps – to get some comments/criticism, and also to enable me to refer to it, if necessary, in future blog posts. If I’m honest, classifications and taxonomies fatigue me quite a lot; coming up with ideas and making and testing them is a lot more fun. But sometimes they’re useful. I hope this one is.

If we think about how products are used, it’s clear that changes can result from the products themselves changing, users changing their behaviour, or a combination of both.

At the University of Bath, Ed Elias, Elies Dekoninck and Steve Culley [1] have captured these possibilities with a 2 × 2 matrix (Figure 1), in which ‘new products’ and ‘old products’ are compared with ‘new user behaviour’ and ‘old user behaviour’.

Along these lines, it’s possible to consider technology change (via design) and attitude change (via education) as two routes to achieve overall behaviour change. Especially in the sustainable design field, the emphasis is often on one strategy or the other, even though the routes are by no means mutually exclusive, as the ‘Design for New User Behaviour’ title implies in the matrix.

Loughborough’s Debra Lilley, Vicky Lofthouse and Tracy Bhamra [2] describe three ‘solutions to limit socially and environmentally undesirable behaviours’: Educational intervention – which corresponds closely to attitude change; Technological intervention – corresponding to technology change; and Product-led intervention – closely aligned with Elias et al’s Design for New User Behaviour.

Further consideration of the possibilities in this area, and how to represent them, led me to the development of a ‘Behaviour Change Barometer’. This diagram attempts to illustrate somewhat more nuanced ‘cases’ of behaviour change, and which factors are present or absent in each case. It ought to be applicable to many kinds of behaviour change with products, not just environmentally-related ones; equally, read ‘products/services/systems’ for ‘products’ to allow wider applicability. The barometer metaphor is stretched slightly, but it seemed appropriate given that the diagram’s mapping change.

The same information is presented in tabular form here: in essence, there are six variables involved, with the possibility space divided into quadrants.

The focus of my research is on the intersection of technology change and attitude change (Quadrant 3): the design of products (and systems) which, through new product behaviour, change user behaviour. Quadrant 3 will be discussed last here – before that, it’s useful to run through the other quadrants briefly.

Quadrant 1: Status quo

In the first quadrant, no overall behaviour change results.

It makes sense to describe case 1b first – this is the absolute ‘no change’ case, where there is no change in the actual functions of the products (they might be new products, but they don’t do anything different to the old products), people use them in the same way they did before, and users have no understanding or mindfulness of the issues around behaviour change.

Case 1a describes situations where the products’ functions have been changed, but users make no use of this, and have no understanding or mindfulness of the issues involved (e.g. a washing machine offers a new ‘eco’ mode alongside the other settings, but a user doesn’t use it). Therefore no overall behaviour change results, despite product improvement.

In 1c, users have an understanding of the issues, and may be mindful of their behaviour and its impacts, but nevertheless don’t change what they do, and continue to use products in the same way as before – e.g. someone who knows that leaving a television on standby wastes electricity, but doesn’t act on this understanding. Again, no overall behaviour change results, despite improved user understanding.

This quadrant encompasses much current behaviour with energy-using consumer products – improved education and improved technology have raised awareness of environmental issues, and allowed products to be operated more efficiently, but if users don’t act accordingly, there will be no overall change in behaviour.

Quadrant 2: New user behaviour with existing products

Educating users about the implications of their behaviour is generally done with the intention that users will follow through and actually change the way they use products (if they don’t change, this is 1c as described above). If this is successful – e.g. a campaign to persuade people to keep their car tyres inflated correctly to save fuel – then new user behaviour occurs with existing products, and no design or engineering changes are needed to the products. Overall, there is a change in behaviour.

The scope of this quadrant corresponds closely with much current government policy of using social marketing, public education campaigns and so on – employing persuasion and rhetoric to drive attitude change as a foundation for behaviour change. There are many ways that this quadrant could be subdivided into behavioural cases, but from the point of view of the current study, this won’t be explored further here.

Quadrant 4: Existing user behaviour with new product behaviour

Where new products themselves behave differently in use, yet allow users to maintain their existing behaviours, overall behaviour change results without users necessarily needing to understand the issues involved. No persuasion occurs. For example, compact fluorescent lightbulbs, from the user’s point of view, do not require any different user behaviour to tungsten filament bulbs, but in operation they always result in new product behaviour. A refrigerator door which automatically closes itself if left ajar does not, again, require the user to do anything different, but the product itself behaves differently to accommodate existing user behaviour.

This quadrant would include the major proportion of ‘eco-products’ available, most of which are designed to allow the user to change routines and behaviours as little as possible; there are many possible ways the category can be subdivided further according to various other factors.

Quadrant 3: New user behaviour with new product behaviour

In the cases described by this quadrant, both product behaviour and user behaviour change, resulting in an overall behaviour change. The behaviour change can be driven entirely by functional changes to the product, or by mindful user understanding, or by both, but the products are designed to lead to this. This is Design with Intent.

These are products that persuade, guide or force – influence – users to change the way they interact with them. A common factor is that there is a perceived affordance change with the product: it somehow indicates that a change in behaviour is needed (compared with quadrant 4 where there is no such indication). This quadrant is where my research is focused.

In case 3a, the perceived affordance change does not reflect actual functional change to the product, yet it influences users to change their behaviour. For example, a washing machine which gives users an ‘estimated cost’ for each mode still embodies all the same functions as one which doesn’t – the user can choose to ignore the recommendation, but is influenced to choose the most economical mode, and thus a change in product behaviour is likely to result from the change in user behaviour. This is where much of the Persuasive Technology research seems to fit.

3c is the case where a user need not think about the issues involved, but will still behave differently due to functional changes to the product – e.g. a washing machine which automatically determines the most efficient settings for a particular load, and silently carries them out, doesn’t require the user to understand what’s going on, but does end up changing the user’s behaviour (removing inefficient decisions) and thus the product behaviour changes too. These products have the potential to be complex, especially where automation is required, but need not be. Something as simple as removing an option from a menu changes the user’s behaviour (prevents him or her choosing it) but doesn’t require the user to think about it.

Finally, returning to the centre of the quadrant, 3b describes cases where user understanding, alongside functional changes to the product and perceived affordance change, lead to user and product behaviour change in practice: these are the real core of what this study is about and where, I hope, I’ll be able to make advances in understanding useful to designers and anyone else working in the field of influencing user behaviour. These are interesting products, potentially involving lots of factors and effects but not necessarily complex in themselves.

[1] Elias, E W A, Dekoninck, E A, Culley, S J. The Potential for Domestic Energy Savings through Assessing User Behaviour and Changes in Design. EcoDesign2007, 5th International Symposium on Environmentally Conscious Design and Inverse Manufacturing, Tokyo, 2007
[2] Lilley, D, Lofthouse, V, Bhamra, T. Towards Instinctive Sustainable Product Use. 2nd International Conference: Sustainability Creating the Culture, Aberdeen, 2005. Available here [PDF].

Peer Treasure: how firms outside the software industry can use open source thinking
How can we strengthen links between entrepreneurial companies and entrepreneurial universities in the UK?
Motor vehicles in the developing world: options for sustainability* [all PDFs]

Reading them again now, I’m struck by a) how much terminology and how many concepts I’ve since forgotten through lack of use, b) how I didn’t really know what I was going to go on to do afterwards, c) how barely I even scratched the surface of the subjects, and d) how naïve I was about academia and how it worked (still am, in fact).

As a bonus, here’s a note-form list of possible dissertation subjects I considered at Cambridge before settling on architectures of control in consumer product design [PDF] (which ultimately led to this site, and three years later to starting a PhD at Brunel, and where I am now). The possible subjects are quite an odd mixture of obsessions and paranoia.

18/11/2004 Possible dissertations, linking technology & policy

This is a list of some ideas I have for possible dissertations for my MPhil (Technology Policy). The list may be added to, over the next few weeks. Putting it on the internet is more of an experiment to see if anyone has any apposite comments (or indeed if anyone finds it). It will also lead to some interesting search results in Google.

Please note: some of these opinions/suggestions are very controversial. It doesn’t mean I agree with them. And certainly Cambridge University would not want to be associated with any of the ideas.

1) The Powerpoint Effect: What effects has the Powerpoint style of corporate presentation and communication had on business thinking, planning and culture? Example: Columbia disaster (would be following Edward Tufte’s work – how could I extend it?)

2) To what extent have trivial political issues affected the design, engineering & manufacturing of products? (i.e. not environmental or genuine social issues, but ones related to pleasing a particular area – e.g. Hillman Imp at Linwood – or particular lobby group or party. Example, space shuttle solid fuel segments made in Utah for political reasons, led to Challenger disaster)

3) Related to 2: Political Correctness in product design. Does it really exist? Is it a problem? Or is the whole idea of providing what most customers want (in a very competitive market) entirely immune to the ‘PC’ label? i.e. Benthamite utilitarianism rather than any hidden agenda? Example: clear sticking plasters rather than ‘skin colour’ pink – this may be politically correct, but it does not have the potential to offend or inconvenience anyone. Whatever your skin colour, a clear plaster is fine. But if all aeroplane seats were made extra-wide in case a very fat person needed to travel, and the capacity of the plane was therefore reduced substantially, leading to higher fares for everyone, is this a case of political correctness in design rather than expediency/utilitarianism?

4) To what extent does ‘productisation’ of high-risk or experimental ventures (shuttle, APT?) lead governments and the public to take a less tolerant attitude to failure? i.e. by talking up new science advances and putting everything in a commercial context, have we blurred the lines between what should be regarded as safe, established consumer products and what are much less resolved or ‘packaged’?

5) What is the UK’s excuse? Why have we consistently failed to develop technology to the extent of US or Japan? Is there anything we can do? Are we doomed? Is it attitude? Are we ahead, i.e. that we’ve already passed our peak while others still have to reach theirs?

6) To what extent has the British taxpayer (through privatisation of nationalised industries) funded multinational companies’ profits? e.g. aero engines, Land Rover, K-series, APT (Pendolino)

7) Can the British motor industry survive?

8 ) Do consumers treat ‘British’ technology differently to that perceived to be ‘from’ other countries? National ‘design’ styles are recognised but are there evident ‘technology’ styles?

9) Full circle: do we need Colleges of Advanced Technology again?

10) The future of insurance in an increasingly uncertain world: a case for nationalisation?

11) Non-profit technology companies: could they facilitate large-scale shifts in consumer behaviour towards more sustainable, environmentally sensitive products by undercutting conventional competition? Where could the money come from?

12) How will the future direction of environmental and energy technology policy affect consumer products?

13) How will the future direction of intellectual property policy affect consumer products?

14) How has the evolution of consumer products affected technology policy, and how will it do so in the future?

15) Related to 9: Private universities – should the UK go down this route? What about ‘technology’ universities sponsored or run by major technology companies?

16) Narrow disciplines in academia: what advances have we lost because of them?

17) Related to 16: can we create a new a Renaissance Man (and Woman) through science education?

18) Are computer-managed design & development systems (PLM, etc.) guilty of destroying actual innovation? Has all real innovation been outsourced/isolated from the real development process?

19) Are meaningless business terminology and diagrams destroying innovation in product and new technology development? Are we over-analysing? (Use examples of actual companies’ development models – if they need them!)

20) Related to 5: What’s the real reason we fail at entrepreneurship in the UK? Will any of these initiatives be of any use at all? What can we do to win?

21) Should the UN decide on a ‘global future of Mankind’ strategy/policy/mission statement, esp. with regard to technology?

22) Engineering & physical/chemical science degree applications are falling. How can we make them attractive without diluting them? Or should we be making them attractive at all?

23) Related to 22: Has the public’s understanding of science decreased? Is this due to dumbing down of education?

24) UK plc: should we actually create it?

25) Related to 24 and 11: should we specifically seek to form (ultimately) profit-seeking nationalised companies, especially in high-technology sectors, to invest public money in creating something that will eventually pay back enormously? e.g. the French government owns EDF, which operates worldwide

26) By presenting the government as, increasingly, a ‘nanny state’ which knows what’s best for all of us, have we unwittingly created a generation which believes the government to have all the answers, in philosophy and morality as well as science and technology? By ‘giving’ people human ‘rights’, have government / the UN somehow, perceivably, set themselves up in almost a ‘Creator’ rôle? Example: Karl Pilkington evolution discussion, Xfm

27) Related to 26: Human rights or human responsibilities?

28) If we remove the ‘from each according to his means, to each according to his needs’ ethos, would nationalised industries have been more successful in the UK?

29) Edward de Bono’s ‘multiple governments’ competitive market idea. I think it may be in ‘Po: Beyond Yes & No”. Within a country, there would be multiple ‘governments’ – providing different levels of service in return for different tax levels. Could it ever work, even in limited form? Are private education and healthcare a very limited implementation of this already? Would government have to be separated from ‘the law’ to make any of this possible?

dan@danlockton.co.uk

*I revised this last paper a bit during the short, speculative life of Lockton Motor Ltd (hence the logos) – a story I’m sure I’ll get round to telling one day.

Your [Chris Vallance's] generation really understood the computers, and today’s generation know they’re just a tool, and don’t really get to grips with them… When I was starting in business, and when I was a child, electronics was a huge hobby, and you could buy components on the street and make all sort of things, and people did. But that also has all passed; it’s almost forgotten.

It’s true, of course, that there are still plenty of hobbyist-makers out there, including in disciplines that just weren’t open before, and if anything, initiatives such as Make and Instructables – and indeed the whole free software and open source movements – have helped raise the profile of making, hacking, modding and other democratic innovation. It’s no secret that Clive himself is a proponent of Linux and open source in general for future low-cost computing, as is mentioned briefly in the interview, and the impact of the ZX series in children’s bedrooms (together with BBC Micros at school) was, to some extent, a fantastic constructionist success for a generation in Britain.

But is Clive right? How many schoolkids nowadays make their own radios or burglar alarms or write their own games? When they do, is it a result of enlightened parents or self-directed inquisitiveness? Or are we guilty of applying our own measures of ‘engagement’ with technology? After all, you’re reading something published using WordPress, which was started by a teenager. Personally, I’m extremely optimistic that the future will lead to much greater technological democratisation, and hope to work, wherever possible, to contribute to achieving that.

I’ve worked for Clive, as a designer/engineer, on and off, for a number of years, and it’s pleasing to have an intelligent media interview with him that doesn’t simply regurgitate and chortle over the C5, but instead tries to tap his vision and thoughts on technical society and its future.

Silicon Dreams

Incidentally, Clive’s 1984 speech to the US Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future, mentioned in the interview, is extremely interesting – quite apart from the almost Randian style of some of it – as much as for the mixture of what we might now see as mundanities among the far-sighted vision as for the prophetic clarity, with talk of guided 200mph maglev cars and the colonisation of the galaxy alongside the development of a cellular phone network and companion robots for the elderly. Of course, the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.

Talk of information technology may be misleading. It is true that one of the features of the coming years is a dramatic fall, perhaps by a factor of 100, in the cost of publishing as video disc technology replaces paper and this may be as significant as the invention of the written word and Caxton’s introduction of movable type.

Talk of information technology confuses an issue – it is used to mean people handling information rather than handling machines and there is little that is fundamental in this. The real revolution which is just starting is one of intelligence. Electronics is replacing man’s mind, just as steam replaced man’s muscle but the replacement of the slight intelligence employed on the production line is only the start.

And then there is this, which seems to predict electronic tagging of offenders:

Consider, for example, the imprisonment of offenders. Unless conducted with a biblical sense of retribution, this procedure attempts to reduce crime by deterrence and containment. It is, though, very expensive and the rate of recidivism lends little support to its curative properties.

Given a national telephone computer net such as I have described briefly, an alternative appears. Less than physically dangerous criminals could be fitted with tiny transporters so that their whereabouts, to a high degree of precision, could he monitored and recorded constantly. Should this raise fears of an Orwellian society we could offer miscreants the alternative of imprisonment. I am confident of the general preference.

TU Delft’s Renee Wever and Jasper van Kuijk (who runs the insightful Uselog product usability blog), together with NTNU’s Casper Boks, have produced a very interesting paper, ‘User-Centred Design for Sustainable Behaviour’ [PDF, 400 kb] for the International Journal of Sustainable Engineering (indeed, probably in the same edition as my own paper addressing many similar ideas.)

It’s great to find more people investigating this same area of using design to guide more sustainable user behaviour, both from the point of view of validation (i.e. I’m not barking up completely the wrong tree) and because it helps add additional perspectives and research to the pot. Wever, van Kuijk and Boks’ classification of different strategies may be useful, too, in helping me structure my own taxonomy:

We provide a typology of four user-centered design strategies for inducing sustainable behavior.

* Functionality matching: adapt a product better to the actual use by consumers and thereby try to minimize negative side effects;
* Eco-feedback: the user is presented with specific information on the impact of his or her current behavior, and it is left to the user to relate this information to his or her own behaviour, and adapt this behaviour, or not;
* Scripting: creating obstacles for unsustainable use, or making sustainable behaviour so easy, it is performed almost without thinking about it;
* Forced functionality: making products adapt automatically to changing circumstances, or to design-in strong obstacles to prevent unsustainable behaviour.

That’s a simpler and possibly clearer way of dividing it up than the designer-centric approach I’ve been taking (e.g. see this series of posts), though my method aims to apply to all using-design-to-shape-behaviour problems, including, but going beyond, ecodesign.

I’m heartened to read this in the paper:

An overview of the available design strategies is missing, as is a clear approach for choosing the right strategy for a given product.

That’s very much part of what I’m trying to achieve.

I’ll certainly keep an eye on what the guys from Delft and NTNU do next!

Making the user more efficient: Design for sustainable behaviour [PDF, 160kb] is a brief review of approaches to designing products and systems which could shape or change users’ behaviour in an environmentally friendly way; if you’ve followed this blog, there’s probably little new in it, but it’s (hopefully) a useful summary. (At present that PDF is hosted on this website, but once Brunel allows me access to deposit papers in its institutional repository, BURA, I’ll change the above link. UPDATED: Changed link 2nd May)

Abstract: User behaviour is a significant determinant of a product’s environmental impact; while engineering advances permit increased efficiency of product operation, the user’s decisions and habits ultimately have a major effect on the energy or other resources used by the product. There is thus a need to change users’ behaviour. A range of design techniques developed in diverse contexts suggest opportunities for engineers, designers and other stakeholders working in the field of sustainable innovation to affect users’ behaviour at the point of interaction with the product or system, in effect ‘making the user more efficient’.

Approaches to changing users’ behaviour from a number of fields are reviewed and discussed, including: strategic design of affordances and behaviour-shaping constraints to control or affect energy or other resource-using interactions; the use of different kinds of feedback and persuasive technology techniques to encourage or guide users to reduce their environmental impact; and context-based systems which use feedback to adjust their behaviour to run at optimum efficiency and reduce the opportunity for user-affected inefficiency. Example implementations in the sustainable engineering and ecodesign field are suggested and discussed.

Keywords: ecodesign; sustainability; managing use; managing consumption;
behaviour change; sustainable innovation; persuasive technology

Until it appears in the journal (probably towards the end of 2008) I’m not sure what the guidance is on referencing, but something like Lockton, D., Harrison, D.J., Stanton, N.A. (2008) ‘Making the user more efficient: Design for sustainable behaviour’, To appear in: International Journal of Sustainable Engineering (forthcoming) is probably about right.

*Required disclaimer:

This is a preprint of an article whose final and definitive form will be published in the International Journal of Sustainable Engineering. © 2008 Taylor & Francis; International Journal of Sustainable Engineering is available online at: http://journalsonline.tandf.co.uk/

I’m pleased to say that I’ll be presenting a short paper, Design With Intent: Persuasive Technology in a Wider Context* at Persuasive 2008, the 3rd International Conference on Persuasive Technology, taking place from June 4th-6th in Oulu, Finland.

The paper’s a (very) brief introductory review of some of the different approaches to ‘Design with Intent‘ from various disciplines, many of which have been discussed to some extent on this website, with an attempt to relate them to persuasive technology, the field started by Stanford’s B J Fogg and his team and now rapidly developing worldwide at the intersection of interaction design and behaviour change. (The paper doesn’t get as far as the DwI Method on which I’m currently working and hoping to test in the next few months.)

This is my first stab at a conference paper, and I’m incredibly excited (and lucky) to have had it accepted; there are a lot of very helpful comments and suggested revisions from the reviewers which I will endeavour to incorporate. I’m not sure what the conference organisers’ position is on making the paper available here; certainly authors from previous Persuasive conferences have put papers on their own websites after the conference, so I expect I will do the same. The proceedings will be available as part of Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.

Many thanks to everyone who’s helped with my research via this site, suggesting angles to investigate and helping to clarify my thinking in this area, and to my PhD supervisors at Brunel, Professors David Harrison and Neville Stanton, for their help and support.

*Lockton, D., Harrison, D.J., Stanton, N.A. ‘Design With Intent: Persuasive Technology in a Wider Context’.

Abstract: Persuasive technology can be considered part of a wider field of ‘Design with Intent’ (DwI) – design intended to result in certain user behaviour. This paper gives a very brief review of approaches to DwI from different disciplines, and looks at how persuasive technology sits within this space.

UPDATE (21 April): Following the precedent of some other Persuasive authors, I’ve uploaded a preprint version of the paper here: Design With Intent: Persuasive Technology in a Wider Context [PDF, 169kb]. As required to be stated, this is a self-archived preprint version of the paper, to be presented at Persuasive 2008, June 4-6, Oulu, Finland, and published in H. Oinas-Kukkonen et al. (Eds.): PERSUASIVE 2008, LNCS 5033, pp. 274 – 278, 2008.
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008

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 to Simon for giving me the opportunity to write for this (very knowledgeable) audience, and I hope I’ve done the subject justice.

Surveillance cameras hung like gargoyles from the cornices, following me as I approached the barbican and identified myself to the guard at the reception desk… High above me, fluted columns carried the pitched roofs, an attempt at a vernacular architecture that failed to disguise this executive-class prison. Taking their cue from Eden-Olympia and Antibes-les-Pins, the totalitarian systems of the future would be subservient and ingratiating, but the locks would be just as strong.

Super-Cannes, chapter 15.

Review: Katyal, N. K. “Architecture as Crime Control”, Yale Law Journal, March 2002, Vol 111, Issue 5.

Professor Neal Kumar Katyal of Georgetown University Law School, best-known for being (successful) lead counsel in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case dealing with Guantanamo Bay detainees, has also done some important work on the use of design as a method of law enforcement in both the digital and built environments.

This article, ‘Architecture as Crime Control’, specifically addresses itself to a legal and social policy-maker audience in terms of the areas of focus and the arguments used, but is also very relevant to architects and designers open to being enlightened about the strategic value of their work. Specifically with regard to ‘architectures of control’ and ‘design for behaviour change’, as one might expect, there are many useful examples and a great deal of interesting analysis. In this review, I will try to concentrate on examples and design techniques given in the article, along with some of the thinking behind them – the most useful aspects from the point of view of my own research – rather than attempting to analyse the legal and sociological framework into which all of this fits.

Katyal starts by acknowledging how the “emerging field of cyberlaw, associated most directly with Lawrence Lessig” has brought the idea of ‘code’ constraining behaviour to a level of greater awareness, but suggests that the greater permanence and endurance of architectural changes in the real world – the built environment – may actually give greater potential for behaviour control, as opposed to the “infinitely malleable” architecture of cyberspace:

It is time to reverse-engineer cyberlaw’s insights, and to assess methodically whether changes to the architecture of our streets and buildings can reduce criminal activity.

A theme to which Katyal returns throughout the article is that the policy response to James Wilson and George Kelling’s influential ‘Broken Windows’ – “an architectural problem in crime control” – has largely been a law enforcement one (“prosecution of minor offenses like vandalism in an attempt to deter these ‘gateway crimes’”) instead of actual architectural responses, which, Katyal argues, could have a significant and useful role in this field.

Design principles

Before tackling specific architectural strategies, Katyal discusses the general area of using “design principles” to “influence, in subtle ways, the paths by which we live and think” – a great summary of many of the techniques we’ve considered on this blog over the last couple of years, though not all have been subtle – and gives some good examples:

Fast food restaurants use hard chairs that quickly grow uncomfortable so that customers rapidly turn over

Image from Headphonaught’s Flickr stream

Elevator designers place the numerals and floor indicator lights over people’s heads so that they avoid eye contact and feel less crowded

Supermarkets have narrow aisles so that customers cannot easily talk to each other and must focus on the products instead

(We’ve also seen the opposite effect cited, i.e. using wider aisles to cause customers to spend longer in a particular aisle – clearly, both effects could be employed in different product areas within the same supermarket, to suit whatever strategy the retailer has. There are plenty of other tricks too.)

And, in a footnote, Katyal cites Personal Space by Robert Sommer, which provides:

other examples, such as a café that hired an architect to design a chair that placed “disagreeable pressure on the spine if occupied for over a few minutes” and Conrad Hilton’s decision to move couches out of hotel lobbies to minimise the number of lingering visitors.

(Sommer’s work sounds interesting and relevant, and I look forward to investigating it*)

As Katyal puts it, “with strategies like these, private architects are currently engaging in social control.”

Moving on to architectural strategies for crime control, Katyal expounds four ‘mechanisms’ identified in the field of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED):

Design should:

(1) Create opportunities for natrual surveillance by residents, neighbors and bystanders;

(2) Instill a sense of territoriality so that residents develop proprietary attitudes and outsiders feel deterred from entering a private space;

(3) Build communities and avoid social isolation;

(4) Protect targets of crime.

Before expanding on the practical and legal application of each of these mechanisms, Katyal makes the point that while they can often “work in synergy… natural surveillance is most effective when social isolation is minimized and when design delays the perpetration of crime,” there can be conflicts and any strategy needs to be developed within the context of the community in which it is going to be applied:

Effective design requires input by the community. Without such input, security features are likely to be resented, taken down or evaded (consider the ‘security’ doors propped open on campuses today.

(This issue of ‘resentment’ or even ‘inconvenience’ is, I feel, going to be a significant factor in my own studies of environmentally beneficial behaviour-changing products; we shall see.)

Natural surveillance

The idea of natural surveillance is to create situations where areas are overlooked by neighbours, other residents and so on, with the effect being both a crime deterrent (if the criminal knows he is being watched, or might be watched, he may decide against the crime) and to improve the effectiveness of solving the crime afterwards (someone will have seen what happened). Katyal cites Jane Jacobs‘ argument that diversity of use can be an important way of bringing about natural surveillance – preferably with different activities occurring throughout the day, to ensure that there is always a population there to keep any eye on things. However, short of this kind of deliberate diversity planning, there are specific techniques that can be used on individual buildings and their surroundings to increase natrual surveillance; Katyal suggests the addition of windows facing onto public spaces, ensuring sight lines down corridors and alleyways, positioning windows so that neighbours can watch each other’s houses, bringing parking areas in front of stores rather than out of sight behind them, and making sure hallways and lobbies are clearly visible to passers-by. He gives the example of redesigning the layout of a school’s grounds to increase the opportunity for natural surveillance:

Images from Katyal, N. K. “Architecture as Crime Control”, Yale Law Journal, March 2002, Vol 111, Issue 5.

[In the first image] the informal areas are blocked form sight and far from school grounds. Because no central place for congregation exists, students are spread over the grounds, and there is insufficient density for monitoring. The four open entrances and exits facilitate access to the school and escape.
…
[In the second image,] through the designation of formal gathering areas, other places become subtly off-limits to students. Indeed, those who are present in such areas are likely to attract suspicion…. the formal gathering areas are naturally surveilled by building users… [and] are long and thin, running alongside the school windows, and two hedges prevent students from going fuarther away. Moreover, the west entrance, which had the least potential for surveillance, has been closed…

Lighting can also be a major method of increasing natural surveillance:

First, it helps anyone viewing a situation to see it more clearly and thereby deters some crimes by increasing the powers of perception of those watching. Second, it encourages people to be in the area in the first place because the greater visibility creates a sense of security. The more eyes on the street, the more visibility constrains crime.

(Incidentally, Katyal comments – having interviewed an architect – that the use of yellow street lighting “can increase the crime rate by making streets (and individuals on them) look menacing”, hence a tendency for some urban developers to move to white lighting instead.)

Territoriality

Territoriality – also much of the focus of defensible space (which I’ll discuss in a later post) – “both provides an incentive for residents to take care of and monitor an area and subtly deters offenders by warning them that they are about to enter a private space.” Some of Katyal’s examples are wonderfully simple:

Building community

The third main mechanism, building community, is also heavily interlinked with the idea of defensible space. The aim here is to encourage a sense of community, by creating spaces which cause people to interact, or even reducing the number of dwellings in each individual set so that people are more likely to recognise and come to know their neighbours – something many architects have instinctively tried to do anyway over the past 20 years or so, though not always explicitly with crime reduction in mind:

…even the placement of seats and benches can bring people together or divide them, creating what architects call, respectively, sociopetal and sociofugal spaces. Some architects self-consciously create sociofugal spaces by, for example, designing chairs in airports that make it difficult for people to talk to each other.

Practically, ‘building community’ would necessarily appear to be slightly more nebulous than some of the other mechanisms, but even techniques such as encouraging people to spend more time in communal areas such as a laundry (and hence potentially interact more) can be important here.

Strengthening targets

There are a number of simple examples of target hardening or strengthening given:

Interestingly, Katyal makes the point that where potential crime targets can be strengthened without making it overly obvious that this has been done, the benefits may be greater:

Modern technology permits targets to be hardened in ways that are not obvious to the public. Strong plastics, graffiti-resistant paint, and doors with steel cores are a few examples. These allow architects to disguise their efforts at strengthening targets and thus avoid sending a message that crime is rampant.
…
Some forms of target hardening are suboptimal in that visibility evinces a fear of crime that can cause damage to the fabric of a community and even increase crime rates.

He again later returns to this point:

Subtle architecture that gently reinfoces law-abiding norms and prevents a degree of intrusion is to be preferred to explicit and awkward physical barricades that reflect the feeling that a community is under siege. Cheap wire fences do not express a belief in the power of law or norms; rather, they reflect the opposite. The same can be said for ugly iron bars on windows, which express the terror of crime as powerfully as does any sign or published crime statistic.
…
A whole host of architectural strategies – such as the placement of doors and windows, creation of semipublic congregation spaces, street layout alterations, park redesign, and many more – sidestep creating an architecture dominated by the expression of fear. Indeed, cheap barricades often substitute for these subtler measures. Viewed this way, gated communities are a byproduct of public disregard of architecture, not a sustainable solution to crime.[my emphasis]

(This last point is especially interesting to me – I must admit I am fascinated by the phenomenon of gated communities and what effect they have on their inhabitants as well as on the surrounding area, both in a Ballardian sense (Running Wild, Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes) and, more prosaically, in terms of what this voluntary separation does to the community outside the gates. See also the quote from architect John Thompson in my forthcoming post reporting what’s happening at the former Brunel Runnymede Campus)

Other aspects

One point to which Katyal repeatedly returns is – a corollary of the above – the concept of architectural solutions as entities which subtly reinforce or embody norms (desirable ones, from the point of view of law enforcement) rather than necessarily enforce them in totality:

Even the best social codes are quite useless if it is impossible to observe whether people comply with them. Architecture, by facilitating interaction and monitoring by members of a community, permits social norms to have greater impact. In this way, the power of architecture to influence social norms can even eclipse that of law, for law faces obvious difficulties when it attempts to regulate social interaction directly.

…

Architecture can prevent crimes even when criminals believe the probability of enforcement is low… one feature of social norms strategies is that they are often self-enforcing.

I think this is a crucial point, and is applicable in other ‘architectures of control’ techniques outside of the built environment and the specific issues of crime. Norms can be extremely powerful influencers of behaviour, and – to take my current research on changing user behaviour to reduce environmental impact – the ability to design a desirable norm into a product or system, without taking away the user’s sense of ownership of, and confidence in, the product, may well turn out to be the crux of the matter.

As (I hope) will be clear, much of Katyal’s analysis seems applicable to other areas of ‘Design for/against X’ where human factors are involved – not just design against crime. So, for example, here Katyal is touching on something close to the concepts of perceived affordances (and disaffordances) in interaction design:

Psychological evidence shows that criminals decode environmental ‘cues’ to assess the likelihood of success of a given criminal act… the design of a meeting table influences who will speak and when, and who is perceived to have a positionof authority. It is therefore no great shock that the eight months of negotiation that preceded the 1969 Paris Peace Talks largely centred on what the physical space of the negotiating table would be. It is said that Machiavelli designed a political meeting chamber with a ceiling that looked asif it were about to collapse, reasoning that it would induce politicians to vote quickly and leave.
…
Winston Churchill… went so far as to claim that the shape of the House [of Commons] was essential to the two-party system and that its small size was critical for ‘free debate’:
…
“The party system is much favoured by the oblong form of chamber… the act of crossing the floor is one which requires serious consideration. I am well informed on this matter, for I have accomplished that difficult process, not only once but twice.”

Significant points are also made is about displacement (or “geographic substitution”) of crime: do architectual measures (especially target hardening and obvious surveillance, we might assume) not simply move crime elsewhere? (We’ve discussed this before when looking at blue lighting in public toilets.) Katyal argues that, while some displacement will, of course, occur, this is not always direct substitution. Locally-based criminals may not have knowledge of other areas (i.e. the certainty that these will not be hardened or surveilled targets), or indeed, where crime is opportunistic, the “costs” imposed by travelling elsewhere to commit it are too high. Equally:

Many devices, such as steel-reinforced doors, strong plastics, and the like are not discernible until a criminal has invested some energy and time. These forms of precaution will thus increase expected perpetration cost and deter offenders without risking substantial displacement.

Also, the fact that increased police presence (for example) in a crime ‘hot-spot’ may also lead to crime displacement, is generally not seen as a reason for not increasing that presence: some targets simply are more desirable to protect than others, and where architectural measures allow police to concentrate elsewhere, this may even be an advantage.

More specific examples

Aside from the analysis, there are a great many architectures of control and persuasion examples dotted throughout Katyal’s article, and while they are somewhat disparate in how I present them here, they are all worth noting from my point of view, and I hope interesting. Apart from those I’ve already quoted above, some of the other notable examples and observations are:

Summary

Ultimately, Katyal’s aim seems to be to encourage policy-makers to see architectural measures as a potentially important aspect of crime reduction, given sensible analysis of each situation, and he suggests the use of Crime Impact Statements – possibly as a requirement for all new development – in a similar vein to Environmental Impact Statements, and leading to similar increases in awareness among architects and developers. Building codes and zoning policies could also be directed towards crime reduction through architectural strategies. Insurance companies, by understanding what measures ‘work’ and which don’t, could use premiums to favour, promote and educate property owners, similarly to the way that widespread adoption of better design for fire protection and prevention was significantly driven by insurance companies.

In this sense, a public (i.e. governmental) commitment to use of architectural strategies in this way would make the process much more transparent than individual private developers adopting ad hoc measures, and, with sensible analysis of each case, could assist local law enforcement and engage communities in reinforcing ‘desirable’ norms and ‘designing away’ some aspects of their problems – though Katyal makes it very clear that architecture alone cannot do this [my emphasis]:

None of this should be mistaken for architectural determinism or its derivative belief that good buildings alone will end crime. These hopes of ‘salvation by bricks’ are illusory. But our rejection of this extreme should not lead us to the opposite extreme view, which holds that physical settings are irrelevant to human beliefs and action. Architecture influences behavior; it does not determine it.

*Katyal also later cites Sommer’s Social Design for the example of airports that “prevent crime by replacing bathroom entrance doors with right-angle entrances that permit the warning sounds of crime to travel more freely and that reduce the sense of isolation”. I’d always assumed that (as with the toilet facilities in many motorway services here in the UK), this was to reduce the number of surfaces that a toilet user would have to touch – a similar strategy to having the entrance doors to public toilet areas pushable/elbowable/nudgable by users leaving the area, rather than forcing recently-washed hands to come into contact with a pull-handle which may not be especially clean. See also Sara Cantor’s thoughts on encouraging handwashing.

Jeremy Schnitker of SoloGig News has also interviewed me about freelance work – bless him, he makes me sound a lot more successful than I really am! SoloGig News is a great site with some fascinating interviews and other information for independent practitioners – as described on the site, “news you can use for the ever-growing freelance set.”

A note about the future

For the last couple of months, alongside some hectic work for clients, I’ve been putting together a proposal for postgraduate (i.e. PhD) research which involves both environmentally sensitive design and architectures of control. Nothing is certain at this stage but as soon as there’s something to report, I will of course blog the details. This could be a very exciting direction in which to head; there may be, indeed, a major road ahead.

*Note that the blockquotes in the original post have been removed without being replaced by any other formatting, so some of the quotes appear as if they’re part of my prose. Also, I’m not Steffen Jahn (if only I were…), nor in fact, Dan Stockton, but those are minor quibbles!

In part 1 of ‘What I’ve learned so far…’ I looked mostly at being a ‘jack-of-all-trades’ and the idea of ‘Wexelblat’s scheduling algorithm’ (or the ‘good, fast, cheap: pick two’ theory) as it applies to a young freelancer starting out. There were some very insightful comments which are also well worth reading.

Before starting on Part 2, I feel I should apologise for the relative dearth of posts recently. This seems to be a recurring pattern, although this time it’s actually resulting in some people unsubscribing in Bloglines… The reason is primarily that I’ve had a series of projects which have taken a lot out of me, time-, sanity- and confidence-wise. I can’t really explain too much at this point, but referring to Client Breeds 6, 7, 8 and 11 as explained at the excellent FreelanceSwitch should give some hints! Suffice to say, I hope never to make the same series of mistakes again. A later part of this series will be my own take on the ‘Client Breeds’ idea and managing different clients’ expectations, but for the moment, on with Part 2:

The Portfolio Dip

When you’re at university, college, or working on design in your spare time, the rate at which you add new work to your portfolio can be equal to the rate you do the work. If you do three projects in the final year of your degree, you can add three projects. But when you start doing ‘real’ projects for companies, they’re likely to be confidential, at least until they reach production (if they even go this far), so you can’t show anyone. This applies, of course, to designers working full-time for a company as well as freelancers, but is more importnat for freelancers. (Incidentally, a friend of mine whom I’d classify as an extremely successful freelancer, suggests that only 1 out 10 potential products developed for clients are ever likely to reach mass production, and he makes that clear to the clients as he goes, which is something I’ve been far too reticent about doing.)

Back to the point: the confidentiality requirements mean that – superficially at least – your portfolio starts to look a bit stale (e.g. this). The rate of new work added drops sharply, and this can certainly have an effect on your own confidence quite apart from – we might expect – not being so persuasive to potential clients. (If you’re also, sensibly, weeding out some of the older projects of which you’re not quite so proud – too studenty, too weak – then as well as the size of the portfolio decreasing, the period it covers may also decrease to a narrow focus around, say, the final two years of your degree. And the rate of work added actually goes negative.) Roughly, you might end up with something like this:

If the most recent stuff you can show them is a student project, or even a speculative competition entry hacked together in your spare time (if any), then they may well treat you like a student or a speculative chancer rather than a professional designer. What they expect to pay you could also be in accordance with this.

Equally, even if the early freelance jobs you take on do reach production quickly, or can be shown without a confidentiality worry, they’re not necessarily going to be especially impressive. For example, I’m grateful for getting the job of making new signage (below) for a local sandwich shop, to the client’s design, but putting this into a portfolio primarily focusing on more technically innovative work may well dilute its appeal to certain prospective clients.

All of the above reinforces something very important. Industrial experience during a degree – ideally a summer internship or an actual sandwich year placement – can be extremely valuable, especially if some of what you worked on has reached production by the time you graduate or start your freelance career. In effect, this work can help ‘plug’ the portfolio gap, with real-life, commercially viable products which may even be familiar to potential clients already. While choosing a sandwich course makes your degree longer – and that year’s wages may be very low – with the right choice of company and some hard work, you may have an asset which makes your portfolio work stand out above others’.

This is the first in a series of essays where I’ll try to look at some of the realities of working freelance in this field; I hope these will be interesting and possibly useful to others contemplating this kind of work. Please note, these are only my own musings and ramblings, written mostly on train journeys across North London, and I might look back on them with embarrassment and disagreement.

At the moment, I’m a freelance designer/engineer/maker. What that means is hard to define. There are no obvious boundaries: I’ve said ‘Yes’ to almost every project, mostly out of necessity but partly out of trying to determine what I’m any good at. In practice that means that in the last year-and-a-bit I’ve worked on some diverse stuff, from developing ultra-lightweight bikes to designing novelty packaging, from researching multinationals’ brand architectures to doing toothed belt calculations for gearboxes. I’ve tested radio-controlled things in the Thames looking across at Windsor Castle, and grappled with CSS while sitting in an abandoned factory in Dalston. I’ve hand-lettered sandwich shop menu blackboards and sprayed T-shirts with the logo of a new telemetry spin-out company. There’s mechanical engineering in there, some graphics, some electronics, prototype building, even copywriting.

What it’s shown me is that a jack-of-all-trades is not necessarily master of none, but unlikely to be any more than master of some, few in fact. And the main reasons for that — so far as I can tell — are time and money.

Time

If every project is different, you pretty much have to start by spending time simply finding out what you’re doing, what the precedents are in that field, what important things you need to know, even what equipment you’ll need to do the job properly. Some clients tend to assume that anyone ‘technical’ can fix (or indeed design) absolutely anything involving engineering materials, electronics, computers, etc, and while to some extent I don’t think that’s untrue, given experience, it’s probably not the best policy always to say ‘I’ll give it a go’. But you do need to test your limits before you can know them.

Back to the point: if you have to spend a significant amount of time on each project learning about the field, each project is going to take you longer than it would for someone who already knows what’s what. And you will make mistakes, of course.

Money

What the above implies is that, as it’s going to take you longer, you’re going to have to work out how to charge. Should the client pay for your learning process? How fair is that?

One point of view would say that no, you’ve created an (intangible) asset for yourself, and the client should only pay for your time once you know what you’re doing. The other point of view says that acquisition of knowledge is a prerequisite of being able to deliver what the client wants. Just as you charge for the acquisition of materials, so should you charge for the acquisition of knowledge. I think the answer probably lies somewhere in between, but it’s difficult for a freelance person — reliant on a sporadic income anyway — to ‘write off’ days as ‘knowledge acquisition’. If you have zero income (and maybe some expenditure) for those days, then you’re going to have to budget for that somehow, and that’s something that’s difficult to plan.

A second major point regarding money is that, well, the client wants to spend as little as possible. Why has he/she/it employed you, a freelance individual with (probably) few facilities other than your brain and your hands, rather than a ‘proper’ design consultancy? Unless the client genuinely thinks you are wonderful, or are likely to come up with stunning insights or innovation which someone else wouldn’t, the reason is probably because you’re cheap, or the client thinks you’ll be cheap (‘Because you’re young, and have lower overheads, right?’).

Wexelblat’s Scheduling Algorithm

But — the client also wants you to be good. So you have to be good and cheap. And on a smaller budget, and with less expertise and experience to call on than an established consultancy. How are you going to do it?

When I was working for a couple of weeks at a well-known design consultancy in London, two experienced freelance designers, David Baird and Simon May were also working on (more important aspects of) the same project. One morning, one of them (I can’t remember if it was David or Simon) drew out on his sketchpad, this diagram…

…and said ‘You can have 2 out of 3. It’s either good and fast (and not cheap), good and cheap (and not fast) or fast and cheap (and not good). That’s what I try to tell clients.’

This stuck with me at the back of my mind; I’ve since found out it’s (sometimes) attributed as Wexelblat’s Scheduling Algorithm (presumably after Richard Wexelblat?), though also apparently an ‘old designer’s adage’ (Jason Kottke) and an ‘old Hollywood maxim‘. The impossible triangle used to illustrate it here is cleverer than what I’ve drawn above, but the principle is the same. (As with so many principles and maxims popularised through software development, it also seems to apply very well to design and physical product development.)

As we’ve seen, the client wants a project to be good and cheap. Hence, if Wexelblat is true, it’ll be slow, even if some of that slowness is accounted for by knowledge acquisition, and mistakes. But if you’re charging for that time, you’re incurring costs in the process, which tends to counter the ‘cheap’ aspect of the project. So, there’s an inherent difficulty with applying Wexelblat to jobs with a significant learning curve. If your costs are proportional to the time you spend, you can’t be cheap without also being fast, and bad (since you possibly don’t even know what you’re doing). For the inexperienced, cheap and fast and bad is possible, but good implies not fast and not so cheap unless — as we considered earlier — you’re willing/able to write off your learning time.

Reality

If the above sounds negative, I don’t mean it to. It’s exciting working on new things and building up expertise, but when clients’ primary reason for choosing you in the first place may be cheapness, you’re going to have something of a difficult compromise and balancing act on your hands, just in terms of scheduling your work and budget, let alone the specific challenges of the project in question. It might mean that your definition of ’1 day’s work’ slowly seeps into becoming ’7.30 am to 2 am’ just in order to get everything done in the same number of days you promised, and for the same cost. That’s fun for a while, but gets pretty tiring for those around you even before you get fed up.

An implication of all that is that to be competing on price alone can be a stressful game, especially when having to do so simply to get enough work means that you have a lot of learning to do for every project. It’s something of a positive feedback loop, a vicious circle. But, if you can build up enough experience in a particular field, and are able to use knowledge acquired (or problems solved) on a previous project, you have the start of something more edifying. You may still be able to compete on price, but you can now be cheap, faster and better, since you know what you’re doing. And, slowly, gradually, you might even be able to specialise in a certain field, no longer jack-of-all-trades, but actually mastering something.

This is the first book review I’ve done on this blog, though it won’t be the last. In a sense, this is less of a conventional review than an attempt to discuss some of the ideas in the book, and synthesise them with points that have been raised by the examination of architectures of control: what can we learn from the arguments outlined in the book?

Adam Greenfield‘s Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing looks at the possibilities, opportunities and issues posed by the embedding of networked computing power and information processing in the environment, from the clichéd ‘rooms that recognise you and adapt to your preferences’ to surveillance systems linking databases to track people’s behaviour with unprecedented precision. The book is presented as a series of 81 theses, each a chapter in itself and each addressing a specific proposition about ubiquitous computing and how it will be used.

There’s likely to be a substantial overlap between architectures of control and pervasive everyware (thanks, Andreas), and, as an expert in the field, it’s worth looking at how Greenfield sees the control aspects of everyware panning out.

Everyware as a discriminatory architecture enabler

“Everyware can be engaged inadvertently, unknowingly, or even unwillingly“

In Thesis 16, Greenfield introduces the possibilities of pervasive systems tracking and sensing our behaviour—and basing responses on that—without our being aware of it, or against our wishes. An example he gives is a toilet which tests its users’ “urine for the breakdown products of opiates and communicate[s] its findings to [their] doctor, insurers or law-enforcement personnel,” without the user’s express say-so.

It’s not hard to see that with this level of unknowingly/unwillingly active everyware in the environment, there could be a lot of ‘architectures of control’ consequences. For example, systems which constrain users’ behaviour based on some arbitrary profile: a vending machine may refuse to serve a high-fat snack to someone whose RFID pay-card identifies him/her as obese; or, more critically, only a censored version of the internet or a library catalogue may be available to someone whose profile identifies him/her as likely to be ‘unduly’ influenced by certain materials, according to some arbitrary definition. Yes, Richard Stallman’s Right To Read prophecy could well come to pass through individual profiling by networked ubiquitous computing power, in an even more sinister form than he anticipated.

Taking the ‘discriminatory architecture’ possibilities further, Thesis 30, concentrating on the post-9/11 ‘security’ culture, looks at how:

“Everyware redefines not merely computing but surveillance as well… beyond simple observation there is control… At the heart of all ambitions aimed at the curtailment of mobility is the demand that people be identifiable at all times—all else follows from that. In an everyware world, this process of identification is a much subtler and more powerful thing than we often consider it to be; when the rhythm of your footsteps or the characteristic pattern of your transactions can give you away, it’s clear that we’re talking about something deeper than ‘your papers, please.’

Once this piece of information is in hand, it’s possible to ask questions like Who is allowed here? and What is he or she allowed to do here?… consider the ease with which an individual’s networked currency cards, transit passes and keys can be traced or disabled, remotely—in fact, this already happens. But there’s a panoply of ubiquitous security measures both actual and potential that are subtler still: navigation systems that omit all paths through an area where a National Special Security Event is transpiring, for example… Elevators that won’t accept requests for floors you’re not accredited for; retail items, from liquor to ammunition to Sudafed, that won’t let you purchase them… Certain options simply do not appear as available to you, like greyed-out items on a desktop menu—in fact, you won’t even get that back-handed notification—you won’t even know the options ever existed.”

This kind of ‘creeping erosion of norms‘ is something that’s concerned me a lot on this blog, as it seems to be a feature of so many dystopian visions, both real and fictional. From the more trivial—Japanese kids growing up believing it’s perfectly normal to have to buy music again every time they change their phone—to society blindly walking into 1984 due to a “generational failure of memory about individual rights” (Simon Davies, LSE), it’s the “you won’t even know the [options|rights|abilities|technology|information|words to express dissent] ever existed” bit that scares me the most.

Going on, Greenfield quotes MIT’s Gary T Marx‘s definition of an “engineered society,” in which “the goal is to eliminate or limit violations by control of the physical and social environment.” I’d say that, broadening the scope to include product design, and the implication to include manipulation of people’s behaviour for commercial ends as well as political, that’s pretty much the architectures of control concept as I see it.

In Thesis 42, Greenfield looks at the chain of events that might lead to an apparently innocuous use of data in one situation (e.g. the recording of ethnicity on an ID card, purely for ‘statistical’ purposes) escalating into a major problem further down the line, when that same ID record has become the basis of an everyware system which controls, say, access to a building. Any criteria recorded can be used as a basis for access restriction, and if ‘enabled’ deliberately or accidentally, it would be quite possible for certain people to be denied services or access to a building, etc, purely on an arbitrary, discriminatory criterion.

“…the result is that now the world has been provisioned with a system capable of the worst sort of discriminatory exclusion, and doing it all cold-bloodedly, at the level of its architecture… the deep design of ubiquitous systems will shape the choices available to us in day-to-day life, in ways both subtle and less so… It’s easy to imagine being denied access to some accommodation, for example, because of some machine-rendered judgement as to our suitability, and… that judgement may well hinge on something we did far away in both space and time… All we’ll be able to guess is that we conformed to some profile, or violated the nominal contours of some other…

The downstream consequences of even the least significant-seeming architectural decision could turn out to be considerable—and unpleasant.”

Indeed.

Everyware as mass mind control enabler

In a—superficially—less contentious area, Thesis 34 includes the suggestion that everyware may allow more of us to relax: to enter the alpha-wave meditative state of “Tibetan monks in deep contemplation… it’s easy to imagine environmental interventions, from light to sound to airflow to scent, designed to evoke the state of mindfulness, coupled to a body-monitor setting that helps you recognise when you’ve entered it.” Creating this kind of device—whether biofeedback (closed loop) or open-loop—has interested designers for decades (indeed, my own rather primitive student project attempt a few years ago, MindCentre, featured light, sound and scent in an open-loop), but when coupled to the pervasive bio-monitoring of whole populations using everyware, some other possibilities surely present themselves.

Is it ridiculous to suggest that a population whose stress levels (and other biological indicators) are being constantly, automatically monitored, could equally well be calmed, ‘reassured’, subdued and controlled by everyware embedded in the environment designed for this purpose? One only has to look at the work of Hendricus Loos to see that the control technology exists, or is at least being developed (outside of the military); how long before it\’s networked to pervasive monitoring, even if, initially only of prisoners? See also this article by Francesca Cedor.\r\n\r\n\r\nEveryware as \’artefacts with politics\’\r\n\r\nOn a more general \’Do artefacts have politics?\’/\’Is design political?\’ point, Greenfield observes that certain technologies have “inherent potentials, gradients of connection” which predispose them to be deployed and used in particular ways (Thesis 27), i.e. technodeterminism. That sounds pretty vague, but it\’s — to some extent — applying Marshall McLuhan\’s “the medium is the message” concept to technology. Greenfield makes an interesting point:\r\n\r\n

“It wouldn\’t have taken a surplus of imagination, even ahead of the fact, to discern the original Napster in Paul Baran\’s first paper on packet-switched networks, the Manhattan skyline in the Otis safety elevator patent, or the suburb and the strip mall latent in the heart of the internal combustion engine.”

\r\n\r\nThat\’s an especially clear way of looking at \’intentions\’ in design: to what extent are the future uses of a piece of technology, and the way it will affect society, embedded in the design, capabilities and interaction architecture? And to what extent are the designers aware of the power they control? In Thesis 42, Greenfield says, “whether consciously or not, values are encoded into a technology, in preference to others that might have been, and then enacted whenever the technology is employed”.\r\n\r\nLawrence Lessig has made the point that the decentralised architecture of the internet — as originally, deliberately planned — is a major factor in its enormous diversity and rapid success; but what about in other fields? It\’s clear that Richard Stallman\’s development of the GPL (and Lessig\’s own Creative Commons licences) show a rigorous design intent to shape how they are applied and what can be done with the material they cover. But does it happen with other endeavours? Surely every RFID developer is aware of the possibilities of using the technology for tracking and control of people, even if he/she is \’only\’ working on tracking parcels? As Greenfield puts it, “RFID \’wants\’ to be everywhere and part of everything.” He goes on to note that the 128-bit nature of the forthcoming IPv6 addressing standard — giving 2^128 possible addresses — pretty clearly demonstrates an intention to “transform everything in the world, even every part of every thing, into a node.” \r\n\r\nNevertheless, in many cases, designed systems will be put to uses that the originators really did not intend. As Greenfield comments in Thesis 41:\r\n\r\n

“…connect… two discrete databases, design software that draws inferences fromt he appearance of certain patterns of fact—as our relational technology certainly allows us to do—and we have a situation where you can be identified by name and likely political sympathy as you walk through a space provisioned with the necessary sensors.\r\n\r\nDid anyone intend this? Of course not—at least, we can assume that the original designers of each separate system did not. But when… sensors and databases are networked and interoperable… it is a straightforward matter to combine them to produce effects unforeseen by their creators.”

\r\n\r\nIn Thesis 23, the related idea of \’embedded assumptions\’ in designed everyware products and systems is explored, with the example of a Japanese project to aid learning of the language, including alerting participants to “which of the many levels of politeness is appropriate in a given context,” based on the system knowing every participant\’s social status, and “assign[ing] a rank to every person in the room… this ordering is a function of a student\’s age, position, and affiliations.” Greenfield notes that, while this is entirely appropriate for the context in which the teaching system is used:\r\n\r\n

“It is nevertheless disconcerting to think how easily such discriminations can be hard-coded into something seemingly neutral and unimpeachable and to consider the force they have when uttered by such a source…\r\n\r\nEveryware [like almost all design, I would suggest (DL)]… will invariably reflect the assumptions its designers bring to it… those assumptions will result in orderings—and those orderings will be manifested pervasively, in everything from whose preferences take precedence while using a home-entertainment system to which of the injured supplicants clamouring for the attention of the ER staff gets cared for first.”

\r\n\r\nThesis 69 states that:\r\n\r\n

“It is ethically incumbent on the designers of ubiquitous systems and environments to afford the human user some protection”

\r\n\r\nand I think I very much agree with that. From my perspective as a designer I would want to see that ethos promoted in universities and design schools: that is real, active user-centred, thoughtful design rather than the vague, posturing rhetoric which so often surrounds and obscures the subject. Indeed, I would further broaden the edict to include affording the human user some control, as well as merely protection—in all design—but that\’s a subject for another day (I have quite a lot to say on this issue, as you might expect!). Greenfield touches on this in Thesis 76 where he states that “ubiquitous systems must not introduce undue complications into ordinary operations” but I feel the principle really needs to be stronger than that. Thesis 77 proposes that “ubiquitous systems must offer users the ability to opt out, always and at any point,” but I fear that will translate into reality as \’optional\’ in the same way that the UK\’s proposed ID cards will be optional: if you don\’t have one, you\’ll be denied access to pretty much everything. And you can bet you\’ll be watched like a hawk.\r\n\r\n\r\nEveryware: transparent or not?\r\n\r\nGreenfield returns a number of times to the question of whether everyware should be presented to us as \’seamless\’, with the relations between different systems not openly clear, or \’seamful\’, where we understand and are informed about how systems will interact and pass data before we become involved with them. From an \’architectures of control\’ point of view, the most relevant point here is mentioned in Theses 39 and 40:\r\n\r\n

“…the problem posed by the obscure interconnection of apparently discrete systems… the decision made to shield the user from the system\’s workings also conceals who is at risk and who stands to benefit in a given transaction…\r\n\r\n”MasterCard, for example, clearly hopes that people will lose track of what is signified by the tap of a PayPass card—that the action will become automatic and thus fade from perception.”

\r\n\r\nThis is a very important issue and also seems especially pertinent to much in \’trusted\’ computing where the user may well be entirely oblivious to what information is being collected about him or her, and to whom it is being transmitted, and, due to encryption, unable to access it even if the desire to investigate were there. Ross Anderson has explored this in great depth.\r\n\r\nThesis 74 proposes that “Ubiquitous systems must contain provisions for immediate and transparent querying of their ownership, use and capabilities,” which is a succinct principle I very much hope will be followed, though I have a lot of doubt.\r\n\r\n\r\nFightback devices\r\n\r\nIn Thesis 78, Greenfield mentions the Georgia Tech CCD-light-flooding system to prevent unauthorised photography as a fightback device challenging everyware, i.e. that it will allow people to stop themselves being photographed or filmed without their permission.\r\n\r\nI feel that interpretation is somewhat naïve. I very, very much doubt that offering the device as a privacy protector for the public is a) in any way a real intention from Georgia Tech\’s point of view, or b) that members of the public who did use such a device to evade being filmed and photographed would be tolerated for long. Already in the UK we have shopping centres where hooded tops are banned so that every shopper\’s face can clearly be recorded on CCTV; I hardly think I\’d be allowed to get away with shining a laser into the cameras! \r\n\r\nAlthough Greenfield notes that the Georgia Tech device does seem “to be oriented less toward the individual\’s right to privacy than towards the needs of institutions attempting to secure themselves against digital observation,” he uses examples of Honda testing a new car in secret (time for Hans Lehmann to dig out that old telephoto SLR!) and the Transportation Security Agency keeping details of airport security arrangements secret. The more recent press reports about the Georgia Tech device make pretty clear that the real intention (presumably the most lucrative) is to use it arbitrarily to stop members of the public photographing and filming things, rather than the other way round. If used at all, it\’ll be to stop people filming in cinemas, taking pictures of their kids with Santa at the mall (they\’ll have to buy an \’official\’ photo instead), taking photos at sports events (again, that official photo), taking photos of landmarks (you\’ll have to buy a postcard) and so on. \r\n\r\nIt\’s not a fightback device: it\’s a grotesque addition to the rent-seekers\’ armoury.\r\n\r\nRFID-destroyers (such as this highly impressive project), though, which Greenfield also mentions, certainly are fightback devices, and as he notes in Thesis 79, an arms race may well develop, which ultimately will only serve to enshrine the mindset of control further into the technology, with less chance for us to disentangle the ethics from the technical measures.\r\n\r\nConclusion\r\n\r\nOverall, this is a most impressive book which clearly leads the reader through the implications of ubiquitous computing, and the issues surrounding its development and deployment in a very logical style (the \’series of theses\’ method helps in this: each point is carefully developed from the last and there\’s very little need to flick between different sections to cross-reference ideas). The book\’s structure has been designed, which is pleasing. Everyware has provided a lot of food for thought from my point of view, and I\’d recommend it to anyone with an interest in technology and the future of our society. Everyware, in some form, is inevitable, and it\’s essential that designers, technologists and policy-makers educate themselves right now about the issues. Greenfield\’s book is an excellent primer on the subject which ought to be on every designer\’s bookshelf.\r\n\r\nFinally, I thought it was appropriate to dig up that Gilles Deleuze quote again, since this really does seem a prescient description for the possibility of a more \’negative\’ form of everyware:\r\n\r\n

“The progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination.”

‘

Henry Porter’s chilling Blair Laid Bare – which I implore you to read if you have the slightest interest in your future – contains an equally worrying quote from the LSE’s Simon Davies noting the encroachment of architectures of control in society itself:

“The second invisible change that has occurred in Britain is best expressed by Simon Davies, a fellow at the London School of Economics, who did pioneering work on the ID card scheme and then suffered a wounding onslaught from the Government when it did not agree with his findings. The worrying thing, he suggests, is that the instinctive sense of personal liberty has been lost in the British people.

“We have reached that stage now where we have gone almost as far as it is possible to go in establishing the infrastructures of control and surveillance within an open and free environment,” he says. “That architecture only has to work and the citizens only have to become compliant for the Government to have control.

“That compliance is what scares me the most. People are resigned to their fate. They’ve bought the Government’s arguments for the public good. There is a generational failure of memory about individual rights. Whenever Government says that some intrusion is necessary in the public interest, an entire generation has no clue how to respond, not even intuitively. And that is the great lesson that other countries must learn. The US must never lose sight of its traditions of individual freedom.”"

My blood ran cold as I read the article; by the time I got to this bit I was just feeling sick, sick with anger at the destruction of freedom that’s happened within my own lifetime – in fact, within the last nine years, pretty much.

Regardless of actual party politics, it is the creeping erosion of norms which scares the hell out of me. Once a generation believes it’s normal to have every movement, every journey, every transaction tracked and monitored and used against them – thanks to effective propaganda that it’s necessary to ‘preserve our freedoms’* – then there is going to be no source of reaction, no possible legitimate way to criticise. If making a technical point about the effectiveness of a metal detector can already get you arrested, then the wedge is already well and truly inserted.

Biscuit packaging kind of pales into insignificance alongside this stuff. But, ultimately, much the same mindset is evident, I would argue: a desire to control, shape and restrict the behaviour of the public in ways not to the public’s benefit, and the use of technology, design and architecture to achieve that goal.

Heinlein said that “the human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire”. I fear the emergence of a category who don’t know or care that they’re being controlled and so have no real opinion one way or the other. We’re walking, mostly blind, into a cynically designed, ruthlessly planned, end of freedom.

Related: SpyBlog | No2ID | Privacy International | Save Parliament | Areopagitica

*Personally, I have serious doubts about the whole concept of any government or organisation ‘giving’ its people rights or freedoms, as if they are a kind of reward for good behaviour. No-one, elected or otherwise, tells me what rights I have. The people should be telling the government its rights, not the other way round. And those rights should be extremely limited. The 1689 Bill of Rights was a bill limiting the rights of the monarch. That’s the right way round, except now we have a dictator pulling the strings rather than Williamanmary.