Expansion of coverage

Simply, I want to expand the subjects I blog about, while very much continuing and deepening the more focused research into architectures of control, without losing you, the audience. In many cases there are ideas which have spun off from the research which are only tangentially related (things generally do spin off tangentially, of course) but which are nevertheless fascinating.

I thought hard about how to do this expansion, and decided to practise what I preach, and do what respects the user the most and still helps me: don’t land you with a load of unwanted posts about irrelevance, but do show you the stuff I’d like to talk about beyond architectures of control (don’t worry, it’s still mostly about design, technology and society), while giving you the option to stick with what you like (the posts on architectures of control).

So, if you want to stick purely with the Architectures of Control posts, past and future, you can do so here. You can also subscribe to a dedicated feed for these posts. If anything this will be more focused than before, since my occasional off-topic commentary and announcements won’t appear here.

To read the full blog – which is called Fulminate (see below for an explanation) – stay right where you are. architectures.danlockton.co.uk, or fulminate.co.uk, will bring you to the full blog, of which the architectures of control posts will still comprise the majority. Of course, it is my hope that many readers will be interested enough to read Fulminate rather than just Architectures of Control, but I’m not going to force it on you.

Splitting the blog entirely would have meant starting from scratch, and it seemed silly to do that. If nothing else, the subjects under discussion will have so much linking and commonality that it would mean a lot of cross-posting anyway. Fulminate’s tagline is “Design, technology and society,” and architectures of control are part of that.

Note too that I’ve dropped the “in Design” bit from “Architectures of Control”, as suggested by a couple of commenters here. With ‘design’ in the tagline (which hasn’t at time of writing found a place in the header), this should still make it clear that the site is about design and the way it affects the world.

Why Fulminate?

‘Fulminate’ comes from the Latin fulmen, lightning. Lightning interests me. It has great potential.

In modern usage, ‘fulminate’ means a number of things:

* to occur suddenly with great intensity
* to explode or detonate, loudly with sudden violence
* to criticize severely

Some of that possibly sounds a bit negative. But then, fulminates are also, of course, friction-sensitive explosives. Silver fulminate, used in Party Poppers and ‘Devil Bangers’, has thus played a rôle in many of our childhoods as something exciting, fun, mischievous, and boundary-testing.

Also, there aren’t that many short, memorable dictionary words left as available domain names. I’d registered fulminate.co.uk in 2005 as a possible name for a design venture which never happened; it seemed much more appropriate for a blog.

The whole fulminate // Architectures of Control thing is a bit of a branding experiment. Renaming the blog Fulminate overnight would have confused people, at least in my mind. If I were a branding consultant, I would say that “the fashionably lower-case ‘fulminate’ thus becomes an endorser brand (using Wally Olins‘ terminology) for the established ‘Architectures of Control’ term. The double solidi (the slashes) indicate more than simply either-or; they imply some sort of hierarchy, as well as being more visually interesting.”

Keep reading. There’s some exciting stuff on the way.

Now, the immediate response of most of us is probably “razor blade model!” or even “stifling democratic innovation!” (as Hal Varian or Eric von Hippel might put it), and indeed that was probably my own instinctive reaction.

It’s not clear, though, that this is a standard architectures-of-control-enforced-razor-blade-model of the kind we’ve seen with printer cartridges. Most phone owners surely don’t ever replace their batteries during the life of the phone, so I can’t believe that selling owners batteries can be a major part of the business plan for a new phone. I’ve never bought new batteries for any phone I’ve owned. A friend did, though by that time his phone was six or seven years old and he had to resort to eBay to find the correct type.

No, the promulgators of battery authentication claim that battery authentication is all about ensuring consumer safety:

“Battery-pack authentication is necessary because the lithium-ion cells that are the building blocks of all such packs are changing, and, although they still may have the same physical dimension, their input charging voltage and required charging rates are changing and fragmenting across markets. If the cells charge at the wrong voltage or too quickly, they may explode.“

My reaction, as a design engineer, would be: Why not standardise those characteristics, then? Standards don’t “fragment across markets” without someone causing that fragmentation. (It is true, though, that advancing battery technology does make charging patterns much more important to the life of the battery.)

“Vendors can ship their products with the proper battery pack, only to find that customers go the after-market route to replace or back up battery packs because after-market packs are easy to find and usually cheaper. Counterfeit battery packs pose a threat to user safety.”

Make the ‘proper’ packs cheaper and easier to find, then. Surely that’s cheaper and easier than developing a 64-bit key code battery authentication system, and keeping “its secret key in an 8×8-ft vault with 3-ft-thick walls, [with] only two people in the company hav[ing] vault keys,” as described in the EDN article?

Also, quit using the term ‘counterfeit’ to mean ‘all non-manufacturer-approved parts’. That’s a slippery slope to Newspeak. If I buy Fujifilm for a Kodak camera, is that film ‘counterfeit’? Of course not. It would be if it were being passed off as Kodak film, but that only seems to be the case with some of the batteries mentioned in the article (the Kyocera and LG ones near the start). If that’s the real problem – counterfeit batteries with the manufacturer’s logo on them – then be honest about it.

Greater, cheaper availability of the correct, manufacturer-approved batteries would be beneficial for the manufacturer in terms of aftermarket sales. If it means selling them with reduced margins in order to drive other manufacturers out of the market, then so be it. If the other manufacturers really are counterfeiters, passing off their products with the phone manufacturers’ logos, and the batteries really are dangerous as claimed, then there’s (potentially) a lot of brand damage going on.

The problem of exploding lithium batteries clearly isn’t insignificant – the following images are from a US Army/Naval Surface Warfare Center presentation [PDF] linked in the MAKE post:

Images from http://proceedings.ndia.org/5670/Lithium_Battery-Winchester.pdf

But, as commenter ‘unterhausen’ points out on the MAKE post:

“The risk of Li-poly batteries is independent of the manufacturer to a large degree. The problems come when they are damaged, shorted, overheated, or overcharged… Any Li-poly of the current generation will have the same problems… The chips are anti-competitive nonsense.”

This is an interesting area of debate, and likely only to become more prevalent as energy storage technology becomes more advanced. Will fuel cells for vehicles have authentication ICs built in? You bet.

How will ‘they’ do it with hydrogen fuelling stations, though? Will the pumps/dispensers themselves have a chip which ‘handshakes’ with the vehicle? Will you have to use ‘Toyota’ branded hydrogen for your Toyota to start?

The opportunity’s there, in a way that it never was for standard batteries, petrol, etc, in the past. Few people were naïve enough to buy solely Duracell batteries for their Duracell-branded torch (flashlight) because they thought it ‘would work better’, but when it comes to a device which only works when the manufacturer’s own branded batteries are used

It does make me wonder, though, why Henry Ford never got into the gas station business – was it just antitrust legislation that would have prevented it? General Motors and Standard Oil apparently colluded, and GM also co-owned the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation that held patents for the tetra-ethyl lead added to fuels from the 1920s onwards – which surely provided a large degree of economic lock-in (more GM cars sold = more TEL sold = even more money for GM) – but there was no technological lock-in.

Today we have technology that does allow technological lock-in, and it’s becoming cheaper and cheaper to deploy.

A few days ago, Tim Quinn of Dangerous Curve posted an interesting observation on the Simple Control in Products page:

“This may not be what you had in mind, but I immediately thought of such things as toothpaste pumps that ‘meter’ use to insure the product will be used up quickly at a rate higher than needed. That made me think of the older method of training consumers to over-use. Typified, once again, by toothpaste, with ads which show a brush topped by a generous glop of paste that is far more than necessary to do the job. This strays a bit more from your topic but it could fall under the design for control heading.”

This is definitely a phenomenon worth exploring further, since it’s part of our everyday experience, right under our noses, yet we may not be conscious of it. It’s at the intersection of advertising, marketing and product design, with particular applicability to fast-moving consumer goods. There are some parallels with the Retail Tricks to Make You Shop noted by Space Hijackers, and in the technology field, the manufacturers of printer cartridges have long practised it, whether through technical measures or more subtly (e.g. the Hewlett-Packard MOPyFish).

But the design of product packaging can definitely exhibit architectures of control – forcing functions – in a way reminiscent of Vance Packard’s Hidden Persuaders, taking forcing functions beyond the benign health & safety intentions outlined by Don Norman, to a purely commercially driven design which actually disadvantages the consumer.

I haven’t yet had a chance to examine the toothpaste pumps which Tim mentions above, but the example which sprang immediately to my mind was the use of ‘Tear Here’ tabs on packets of biscuits (cookies). Look at the pictures of a packet of McVitie’s Chocolate Digestives:

That ‘Tear Here’ strip is positioned 4 biscuits down the pack. If you do tear there, as illustrated above, you expose 4 biscuits. Those 4 biscuits aren’t packaged any more. You can’t put them back in the pack; that bit of the wrapper is no longer usable. The biscuits go soft within a few hours when exposed to air. You just have to eat them. And, in fact, probably the next one down, too, to allow the remaining bit of wrapper to be crumpled in to cover the rest of the stack.

So that’s 5 biscuits you’re cajoled into consuming (or at least, given an inconvenience incentive not to consume), just for having opened the pack the ‘recommended’ way. Each biscuit gives you 87 calories and 4 grammes of fat. That’s approaching an ounce of fat if you eat 5 in one go.

Shapes of packaging, too, can be designed to increase consumption of the product – sometimes by dispensing more than is really required, as in Tim’s toothpaste example, but also by making it difficult to reach the last bits of whatever substance is in the packet or container. We’re all familiar with trying to get the last spread out of an oddly shaped jar with a knife or spoon, though whether this is a deliberate architecture of control designed in by the manufacturers is difficult to know. They still have to make the stuff, whether it’s wasted or not; but they do end up selling more jars if no-one can get to the last 10% of what’s in there.

In the picture below (just two immediate examples of ‘stuff left in packaging that’s difficult to get out’ that were lying around my desk), the Marmite jar shape is traditional (and hence probably not a cynical modern design move) while the last bit of glue in the Pritt Stick, which is below the plastic rim and so can no longer be spread, is actually structural (it is the encased end of the glue stick, which is effectively cantilevered). So I think it’d be stretching the point too much to class these as architectures of control (there is no intention to control the user’s behaviour); nevertheless, they are inconveniences for the user.

(In fact, in Marmite’s case, the difficulty in getting the last bit out of the jar has been played on very effectively by the ad agency DDB London in a very clever campaign (worth watching the Quicktime links) for a new ‘Squeezy’ plastic jar ostensibly intended to alleviate the problem (but also reducing packaging costs, and giving 50 grammes less Marmite for the same price). I’m sure the ability to mock – and point out the problems with – the product in this way also says a lot of interesting things about Marmite’s strength and proposition as a brand.)

Back to the main point, then, it’s clear that there are a few ways that consumption of a product can be ‘encouraged’, and to some extent, controlled, by the design of the packaging. This certain qualifies the phenomenon as a an architecture of control, and while on the face of it, a packet of biscuits may not seem to have much in common with digital rights management, ‘trusted’ computing, or urban planning, the intentions behind the way these products and systems are designed have much in common. They are all about shaping users’ behaviour, for political or commercial ends.

We might also think about using the same ideas the other way round. If it were made difficult to eat more than one biscuit at a time, then that might help promote a ‘healthy eating’ intention. If cup-holders in cars were made smaller diameter, so that only smaller soft drink cups would fit, would that make it slightly less convenient to buy a larger soft drink at the drive-through? Would that inconvenience have an effect on people’s behaviour? (I have quite a few more ideas in this vein, but I’ll save them for another day).

Finally, it’s worth considering that the concept of planned obsolescence (or built-in obsolescence) has a good deal in common with ‘excessive consumption’ forcing functions, especially when products ‘expire’ on a certain date or after a certain amount of time. Sometimes the expiry is merely the date printed on the packaging, which is enough to make consumers throw away food or medicines which may still be usable, but in other cases a technological measure is used to expire the items – whether they’re ink cartridges, eBooks, DVDs, ringtones or data across a network. Again, designed-in-obsolescence also has the possibility to be used for more socially beneficial reasons, as I suggested in Optimum Lifetime Products, though as far as I know there are no real-life examples of this at present.

Please do comment: any examples of forcing functions (sneaky or otherwise) designed into packaging, or other products, with the intention of increasing (or reducing) the consumption of the sustance, would be much appreciated. I’ll try to post more as I come across them in the future.