Design with Intent | Cartridges

Do you really need to print that?

By Dan Lockton ⋅ November 6, 2007 ⋅ 13 comments

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

Dependence

By Dan Lockton ⋅ January 17, 2007 ⋅ 3 comments

Karel Donk has some intriguing thoughts on ‘maximising the upside’ of life, by reducing dependence on other people, status and possessions, so that there is less to lose:
So one of the important things in life is to be as independent as possible and rely on very few things. After all, when it comes down to [...]

Epson messes up my day

By Dan Lockton ⋅ October 21, 2006 ⋅ 60 comments

My Epson Stylus Photo R1800’s been running low on ink in a couple of cartridges for a few days now. I’ve been putting off ordering them until this weekend. Now I find that when the printer believes a cartridge has reached 0%, it won’t print anything at all, even if it doesn’t need that colour. [...]

Planned addiction as a method of control: a parasitic lock-in business model

By Dan Lockton ⋅ September 1, 2006 ⋅ 2 comments

The news that tobacco companies have increased the levels of nicotine in their brands over the last few years – especially those popular with certain groups – made me think further about architectures of control:
“The amount of nicotine in most cigarettes rose an average of almost 10 percent from 1998 to 2004, with brands [...]

Ed Felten: DRM Wars, and ‘Property Rights Management’

By Dan Lockton ⋅ August 15, 2006 ⋅ 3 comments

At Freedom to Tinker, Ed Felten has posted a summary of a talk he gave at the Usenix Security Symposium, called “DRM Wars: The Next Generation”. The two installments so far (Part 1, Part 2) trace a possible trend in the (stated) intentions of DRM’s proponents, from it being largely promoted as a tool to [...]

Friend or foe: Battery-authentication ICs?

By Dan Lockton ⋅ July 20, 2006 ⋅ 3 comments

Via MAKE, an article from Electrical Design News looking at lithium battery authentication chips in products such as phones and laptops, designed to prevent users fitting ‘non-genuine’ batteries.
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 [...]

Forcing functions designed to increase product consumption

By Dan Lockton ⋅ July 9, 2006 ⋅ 6 comments

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 [...]

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