Design with Intent

Some interesting projects (Part 2)

By Dan Lockton ⋅ October 10, 2009 ⋅ 7 comments

Following on from Part 1, here are a couple more very interesting student projects linking design and behaviour. This time, both involve providing feedback on the impact or costs of everyday behaviours in order to get people to think.
Tim Holley’s Tio project, developed in response to a brief by Onzo, and described as ‘A Light [...]

{In|Ex}clusive Design

By Dan Lockton ⋅ December 16, 2008 ⋅ 7 comments

Giving with one hand, and taking away with the other.
The juxtaposition of hand rails and anti-sit spikes outside this church in Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire suggests a particular configuration of design priorities: helping people climb the steps, but forbidding anyone sitting on the wall.
Are the targets different groups of people? We might think so: older people [...]

Sarah Burwood: Tumble Sums

By Dan Lockton ⋅ June 14, 2008 ⋅ 4 comments

We’ve covered teaching machines and programmed learning textbooks a few times on the blog, and I’ll admit to a general fascination with analogue computing and similar ideas, ever since reading John Crank’s Mathematics and Industry as a teenager, after finding it in a skip (dumpster) along with a lot of other very interesting books*. It [...]

“Steps are like ready-made seats” (so let’s make them uncomfortable)

By Dan Lockton ⋅ May 30, 2008 ⋅ 46 comments

Adrian Short let me know about something going on in Sutton, Surrey, at the same time both fundamentally pathetic and indicative of the mindset of many public authorities in ‘dealing with’ emergent behaviour:
An area in Rosehill, known locally as “the steps”, is to be re-designed to stop young people sitting there.
Not only will the steps [...]

Mosquito controversy goes high-profile

By Dan Lockton ⋅ February 13, 2008 ⋅ 10 comments

The Mosquito anti-teenager sound device, which we’ve covered on this site a few times, was yesterday heavily criticised by the Children’s Commissioner for England, Sir Albert Aynsley-Green, launching the BUZZ OFF campaign in conjunction with Liberty and the National Youth Agency:
Makers and users of ultra-sonic dispersal devices are being told to “Buzz Off” today [...]

Spear’s Spellmaster: Poka-yoke in the classroom

By Dan Lockton ⋅ January 7, 2008 ⋅ 3 comments

Back in September we looked at Mentor Teaching Machines, a clever type of non-linear textbook from the early 1970s which guides/constrains the user’s progression, in the process diagnosing some common types of misunderstanding and ‘remedying’ them. The comments were enlightening, too: there’s a lot more history to programmed teaching texts and programmed instruction than I [...]

Making exercise cooler

By Dan Lockton ⋅ July 5, 2007 ⋅ Post a comment

Main image and above right: Snowdown aesthetic model; below right: Snowdown functional test rig prototype.
Snowdown, by Matthew Barnett, is fantastic. Powered by a child exercising, moving the handle, it crushes ice cubes and compacts them to make snowballs. There are a lot of kids out there who would very much like one of these, at [...]

The right to click

By Dan Lockton ⋅ July 4, 2007 ⋅ 14 comments

English Heritage, officially the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England, and funded by the taxpayer and by visitors to some of its properties, does a great deal of very good work in widening public appreciation of, and engagement with, history and the country’s heritage.
But its ViewFinder image gallery website* sadly falls into the [...]

More educational architectures of control: museums

By Dan Lockton ⋅ January 30, 2007 ⋅ 4 comments

A ‘traditional’ museum display cabinet in the Kremlin museum, Moscow. I liked the owl.
Two very interesting posts from last week looked at the use of control in museum design – Frankie Roberto discusses trying to get children (in particular) to learn interactively, and Josh Clark has some thoughts on the way that museum and gallery [...]

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