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

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

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

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

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 it, the only thing you can really and always depend on in life is yourself. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t want a lot of things in life. Want and have as much as you like, but require as little as possible. This is the simple rule you can use to guide you in making decisions about what you want to depend on in life.

Interestingly, he also hits on the ‘architectures of control’ issue, briefly:

Today’s world, and indeed for a very very long time now, is structured in such a way where people are directed, if not forced, to become dependent. Dependent on the system, or dependent on others. When you do enough research, you will find that this is all by design. I won’t go into details in this post, but certainly will in the future. For now it’s enough to note that this is by design. The reason why things are set up in this way is of course to be able to control people and limit their freedoms. When people depend on you, you can manipulate them into behaving the way you want. Because they depend on you, they have little choice but to go along with anything you say because they fear losing what they get from you. By definition if someone depends on someone else, or something else, that person has something to lose.

I’m looking forward to reading Karel’s future thoughts on this. Creating dependence, or at least creating a need/desire/requirement to consume more, is a fair characterisation of many architectures of control we’ve looked at on this site, from printer cartridge sneakiness to outright chemical addiction; whether a simple razor-blade model (you need to buy more of this, because it’s the only thing that fits) or something more sinister, Karel is right: the common thread is dependence.

To a large extent, I think this is why education is so important. If we understand the systems around us, technical, political and cultural, we are able to make (better) decisions for ourselves. If, however, we ‘leave it up to others who understand all that stuff’, we become dependent on them.

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. Users (i.e. me) are forced into buying new cartridges at a time when they don’t actually need them in a pathetic exercise of Epson’s control. Workflow is interrupted, plans out of the window.

So now, in order to print something important which needs to be done this afternoon, I am going to have to get on a train and go into a local town, wasting a couple of hours of my life and resulting in entirely unnecessary energy usage and carbon emissions. That’s relatively easy for me: I live next to a railway station. But in areas of the world where it isn’t convenient or possible, how can such thoughtless design be tolerated? Printers a few years ago allowed you to keep printing until the cartridges were actually empty. You knew when to stop because you could see.

Hey Epson: if you push your customers around, they’ll walk away. Forever. It’s as simple as that. People’s time is precious. Convenience is important. There’s no way I’ll ever buy another Epson product or recommend them to anyone else. And I’m a techy guy: occasionally, people do ask my opinion on products. (Of course I’m going to buy cheap refill cartridges; ultimately I may have to get a continuous ink supply system)

Yeah, it’s a rant; it’s also a pathetic piece of design embodying absolute contempt for the customer.

(Sadly the SSC Service Utility mentioned a few months ago doesn’t seem to allow the ink levels to this particular printer to be re-set, though it’s undoubtedly of great use on other models.)

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 most popular with young people and minorities registering the biggest increases and highest nicotine content… the higher levels theoretically could make new smokers more easily addicted and make it harder for established smokers to quit.

…

Boxes of Doral lights, a low-tar brand made by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., had the biggest increase in yield, 36 percent… The nicotine in Marlboro products, preferred by two-thirds of high school smokers, increased 12 percent. Kool lights increased 30 percent. Two-thirds of African American smokers use menthol brands.

…

“The reports are stunning,” said Matthew L. Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. “What’s critical is the consistency of the increase, which leads to the conclusion that it has to have been conscious and deliberate.”"

The classification ‘architectures of control‘ ought rightly to include cigarettes alongside any other product designed to be addictive or to reinforce patterns of users’ behaviour. In this sense, any psychoactive drug intended to control/alter users’ behaviour must be considered part of the same phenomenon, certainly when it is created or administered with that specific intention. And of course, these are not just designed to be unpleasant, but designed to injure and endanger life (not until revenue’s been extracted, of course).

It may seem extreme or inappropriate to link, say, the razor-blade business model with drug addiction (just as it perhaps seemed extreme to put biscuit packaging alongside Henry Porter’s ‘Blair Laid Bare’), but there are definite parallels. A product is designed with a feature which intentionally locks customers into that product, through making it difficult to switch (for cost reasons, by ingraining habits, or by actual chemical or mental addiction). In the cases of, say, printer cartridges or razor blades, the original products (the printer or razor) require frequent refills/replacement parts. In the case of cigarette addiction, the initial use of the product (the cigarettes) modifies the behaviour of the host (the smoker) so that continued purchases of the products are required.

In fact, is this not a parasitic lock-in business model? How different is a product which deliberately causes addiction to, say, a piece of malware which takes over a user’s computer and installs unwanted software, or advertising pop-ups, or, say, phones home regularly and has the potential to hold the user’s data to ransom?

From the point of view of educating the wider public (including designers), the cigarette/drug addiction comparison is a good way of immediately highlighting the issue of ‘product rights management‘ as an architecture of control.*

(Washington Post link via A Blog Around the Clock and BoingBoing)

*Wish I’d thought of it at last Sunday’s Copyfighters’ event!

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 help enforce copyright law (and defeat ‘illegal pirates’) to the current stirrings of DRM’s being explicitly acknowledged as a tool to facilitate discrimination and lock-in — and the apparent ‘benefits of this’:

“First, they argue that DRM enables price discrimination — business models that charge different customers different prices for a product — and that price discrimination benefits society, at least sometimes. Second, they argue that DRM helps platform developers lock in their customers, as Apple has done with its iPod/iTunes products, and that lock-in increases the incentive to develop platforms.

Interestingly, these new arguments have little or nothing to do with copyright. The maker of almost any product would like to price discriminate, or to lock customers in to its product. Accordingly, we can expect the debate over DRM policy to come unmoored from copyright, with people on both sides making arguments unrelated to copyright and its goals.”

As noted by some of the commenters, that unmooring also unmoors the DRM debate from being presented as an ‘honest content providers vs illegal pirating freeloaders’ one. Price-fixing, lock-ins and so on are difficult to defend, and I find it hard to think of convincing examples where “price discrimination benefits society” or “lock-in increases the incentive to develop platforms”. If customers are locked in to a platform, there is no incentive to innovate for the locker-in, and much higher barriers for competitors to draw them away. Path dependency is rarely good for companies, and rarely good for society, and lock-ins would seem to be a major contributor to path dependency. The argument that “Apple wouldn’t have developed the iPod (and the record companies wouldn’t have let Apple develop iTunes) if DRM didn’t exist to lock customers in” is specious: there were plenty of portable music players before they came on the scene, and surely most 40GB music iPods were always intended to be largely filled with music acquired from somewhere other than iTunes.

Ed goes on to talk about the trend “toward the use of DRM-like technologies on traditional physical products.” (Long-term followers – if any! – of my research might remember this is very similar to the phrase “Architectures of control: DRM in hardware” which Cory Doctorow used to link to my original web-page on the subject), and uses the example of printer cartridge lock-ins (see also here):

“A good example is the use of cryptographic lockout codes in computer printers and their toner cartridges. Printer manufacturers want to sell printers at a low price and compensate by charging more for toner cartridges. To do this, they want to stop consumers from buying cheap third-party toner cartridges. So some printer makers have their printers do a cryptographic handshake with a chip in their cartridges, and they lock out third-party cartridges by programming the printers not to operate with cartridges that can’t do the secret handshake.

Doing this requires having some minimal level of computing functionality in both devices (e.g., the printer and cartridge). Moore’s Law is driving the size and price of that functionality to zero, so it will become economical to put secret-handshake functions into more and more products. Just as traditional DRM operates by limiting and controlling interoperation (i.e., compatibility) between digital products, these technologies will limit and control interoperation between ordinary products. We can call this Property Rights Management, or PRM.”

Not too sure about that term myself, as I feel the affordances the technology is controlling are moving further and further away from actual ‘rights’. DRM is bad enough as a catch-all term for technology which in many cases is denying users rights they may legally hold in some countries (e.g. fair use or backup copies). I think “technology lock-ins” or “technology razor-blade models” might be a more descriptive label than ‘PRM’. (Or ‘architectures of control’, of course, but my definition of these is much broader than simply lock-ins).

Ed gives three examples of possible future extensions of technology lock-ins, none of which seem at all unlikely; in fact they’re all easily possible right now:

“(1) A pen may refuse to dispense ink unless it’s being used with licensed paper. The pen would handshake with the paper by short-range RFID or through physical contact.

(2) A shoe may refuse to provide some features, such as high-tech cushioning of the sole, unless used with licensed shoelaces. Again, this could be done by short-range RFID or physical contact.

(3) The scratchy side of a velcro connector may refuse to stick to the fuzzy size unless the fuzzy side is licensed. The scratchy side of velcro has little hooks to grab loops on the fuzzy side; the hooks may refuse to function unless the license is in order [hence my photo at the top of this post! - Dan] For example, Apple could put PRMed scratchy-velcro onto the iPod, in the hope of extracting license fees from companies that make fuzzy-velcro for the iPod to stick to.

Will these things actually happen? I can’t say for sure. I chose these examples to illustrate how far PRM might go. The examples will be feasible to implement, eventually. Whether PRM gets used in these particular markets depends on market conditions and business decisions by the vendors. What we can say, I think, is that as PRM becomes practical in more product areas, its use will widen and we’ll face policy decisions about how to treat it.”

The comments on both posts (Part 1 | Part 2) go into some extremely interesting discussion of the ideas and examples, with the ‘pen/licensed paper’ one being conclusively noted as ‘baked’ with Bill Higgins explaining the Anoto* technology.

(*And no, I don’t think the “www.anotofunctionality.com” of that link is deliberately in the same league as “www.powergenitalia.com,” “www.expertsexchange.com,” etc, but it’s still oddly apposite given the “no to functionality” with which so many lock-ins shed users when they’re fed up with paying over the odds for replacement parts.)

I look forward to the third part of Ed’s talk summary: this is a fascinating area of discussion which is central to much of the ‘architectures of control’ phenomenon.

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.