On ‘Design and Behaviour’ this week: Do you own your stuff? And a strange council-run ‘Virtual World for young people’

GPS-aided repo and product-service systems

Ryan Calo of Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society brought up the new phenomenon of GPS-aided car repossession and the implications for the concepts of property and privacy:
A group of car dealers in Oregon apparently attached GPS devices to cars sold to customers with poor credit so as to be able [...]

Swoopo: Irrational escalation of commitment

Swoopo, a new kind of “entertainment shopping” auction site, takes Martin Shubik’s classic Dollar Auction game to a whole new, automated, mass participation level. It’s an example of the escalation of commitment, or a sunk cost fallacy, where we increase our commitment (in this case with real money) even though (in this case) most users’ [...]

Freudian slip in BBC iTunes story

From this BBC story, as of 6.43 pm.
P.S. I love the way it’s claimed “everyone will benefit” from the royalty rise. As a consumer, I can’t wait to be paying more! Perhaps a price increase will help limit the consumption of this precious rivalrous good… oh, wait…
P.P.S. Not the first time a BBC story about [...]

Pretty Cuil Privacy

New search engine Cuil has an interesting privacy policy (those links might not work right now due to the load). They’re apparently not going to track individual users’ searches at all, which, in comparison to Google’s behaviour, is quite a difference. As TechCrunch puts it:
User IP addresses are not recorded to their servers, they say, [...]

How to fit a normal bulb in a BC3 fitting and save £10 per bulb

Standard 2-pin bayonet cap (left) and 3-pin bayonet cap BC3 (right) fittings compared
Summary for mystified international readers: In the UK new houses/flats must, by law, have a number of light fittings which will ‘not accept incandescent filament bulbs’ (a ‘green’ idea). This has led to the development of a proprietary, arbitrary format of compact fluorescent [...]

Motel 6cc

The plastic* of this built-in Dove shower cream bottle I encountered in a Finnish hotel recently was significantly stiffer than the consumer retail version. The idea is that you press the side of the bottle where indicated to dispense some cream, but it didn’t deform anywhere near as easily as expected, with the result that [...]

Paper Rights Management

This delivery note from Springer informs me that the book I’ve bought “must not be resold”. Good luck with that. So have I bought it or not? Or have I bought a licence to read it? What if I give it away?
Many companies would love to be able to control what users can do with [...]

Digital control round-up

Mac as a giant dongle
At Coding Horror, Jeff Atwood makes an interesting point about Apple’s lock-in business model:
It’s almost first party only– about as close as you can get to a console platform and still call yourself a computer… when you buy a new Mac, you’re buying a giant hardware dongle that allows you [...]

Slanty design

The Main Reading Room, Library of Congress. Image from CIRLA.
In this article from Communications of the ACM from January 2007, Russell Beale uses the term slanty design to describe “design that purposely reduces aspects of functionality or usability”:
It originated from an apocryphal story that some desks in the US Library of Congress in Washington, DC, [...]

Persuasion & control round-up

New Scientist: Recruiting Smell for the Hard Sell
Samsung’s coercive atmospherics strategy involves the smell of honeydew melon:
THE AIR in Samsung’s flagship electronics store on the upper west side of Manhattan smells like honeydew melon. It is barely perceptible but, together with the soft, constantly morphing light scheme, the scent gives the store a blissfully relaxed, [...]