Tim Holley’s Tio project, developed in response to a brief by Onzo, and described as ‘A Light Switch to Help Children Save Energy’ – deservedly won the HSBC Sustainability Prize at the Made in Brunel show:

“Children play a key role in reducing energy consumption due to the fact that they will be among the key decision-makers in the next 30 years. A simple way to engage and educate them is to concentrate on lighting, which accounts for up to 15% of electricity use in the home. The target market for Tio is 7-11 year-olds. This coincides with a period in primary education during which children begin to learn about the environment, energy and the effects that humans are having on the world. Tio [...]allow[s] children to demonstrate their knowledge of energy conservation to their family and encourage their role as ‘energy champions’ of the home. Tio has the potential to reduce lighting-use by up to 25%, resulting in an energy saving of up to 11% over a five year period…

The wall-mounted light switch[...] controls the lighting in the child’s room. Tio is soft and tactile, thus encourages user interaction. The character of ‘Tio’ displayed on the light switch encourages children to turn their lights off: Tio is happy when the lights have only been on for a short period of time. The longer they are left on, the angrier he becomes. This acts as an emotional reminder to turn the lights off…

The recommended ‘lights-on time’ is influenced by the child’s age, their daily activities and the time of day. [...] Information (‘lights-on’ time) is sent wirelessly from the wall switch to a computer. The computer programme allows the child to track their lighting-use performance over an extended period of time. The child takes care of a ‘virtual tree’ by moderating their lighting-use performance. This engages children to make a personal contribution to reducing energy consumption.”

There are some clever ideas in there, including pester-power (“Make sure your parents turn off their lights too”) and, from a Design with Intent toolkit point of view, some of the patterns you might be able to identify include affective engagement, self-monitoring, material properties and metaphors. There’s some neat product detailing too, such as the way Tio’s expressions are formed by different patterns of LEDs being illuminated under the translucent case.

Tim was a very useful and insightful tester of an earlier version of the Design with Intent toolkit back in autumn 2008 (as part of the pilot study reported in this co-authored paper [direct PDF link]) so it’s great to see his project get such recognition. He’s now working for Onzo in product R&D strategy and has some exciting and ambitious plans for the future: as a very talented young designer bringing together creative user-centred design and technology expertise with an eye for business strategy, I’m sure Tim will go far.

Across London at Goldsmiths, Alexander Kirchmann’s ‘Lehman’s Inheritance’ project aims “to create and design products, that can help an individual to manage the [economic] crisis” such as this pint glass with cost markings (right). As Alexander puts it, “my products are the inheritance of the crash… By exposing people to their spending and also to their earnings my design is saving the owner money.”

This is an incredibly simple project (at least the example that’s illustrated – I’d be interested to know what other products Alexander modified / created). But the impact of exposing costs in this way – self-monitoring without any special equipment – could be very effective. In some of the recent workshops I’ve run with designers and students, similarly low-tech feedback concepts have been suggested for problems such as reducing water wastage (sinks with scales marked on them) and reducing overfilling of electric kettles.

More projects coming up in Part 3.

Images from the websites linked.

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 may have more difficulty climbing the steps, and so be more likely to need hand rails, and younger people might be more likely to be ‘hanging around’ outside, and thus ‘need’ to be ‘discouraged’. This might be a simple case of discriminatory architecture, aimed at excluding one group while welcoming another.

But then older people like sitting down too. People in general like sitting down. Is this a case of cutting off your nose to spite own face? Whatever the ‘backstory’ is, the intent behind the different features, and the decision-making process (the spikes look older than the rails) would be interesting to know.

But I digress. A lot of the fascination comes from seeing a different way to explain a concept to someone else: a structured, alternative form of learning or understanding a problem, which is, somehow, immensely satisfying. There’s always the glint of a possibility that if we could find different ways to explain difficult or complex subjects, more people might be able to understand and appreciate them.

Sarah Burwood, a graduating Industrial Design student showing her work at Made in Brunel this week, has created Tumble Sums, a ‘Child’s Mechanical Visual Calculator’:

Helping children understand fundamental mathematical principles, Tumble Sums is a calculating tool which visually shows a child how an answer is being reached. Calculations are solved in a physical way, based solely on mechanical operations. Tumble Sums focuses on an understanding of the way children think, their mathematical understanding and the psychology behind these aspects.

It looks to be beautifully machined from acrylic sections, and that height alone makes it extremely imposing. Imagine one of these at the back of every primary-school classroom!

This concept of making hidden processes visible in order to aid the construction of the user’s mental models is something that will, I think, be an important component of lots of more advanced interfaces in the years ahead, particularly in areas where, fundamentally, we’re bad at understanding the consequences of our actions (environment, health, finances). It’s maybe allied to constructionism, though by no means the same idea.

*Incidentally, the morning I first turned up at Brunel again as a PhD student, I sat in the wonderful garden John Crank had created, reading Vance Packard’s The Waste Makers, waiting for the doors to the building to be unlocked.

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 be made longer and more shallow to make them uncomfortable to sit on, but no handrail will be installed just in case teens decide to lean against it.
…
Explaining the need for the changes, St Helier Councillor David Callaghan said: “At the moment the steps are like ready-made seats so changes will be made to make the area less attractive to young people.

It’s well worth reading the readers’ comments, since – to many people’s apparent shock – Emma, a ‘young person’, actually read the article and responded with her thoughts and concerns, spurring the debate into what seems to be a microcosm of the attitudes, assumptions, prejudices and paranoia that define modern Britain’s schizophrenic attitude to its ‘young people’. The councillor quoted above responded too – near the bottom of the page – and Adrian’s demolition of his ‘understanding’ of young people is direct and eloquent:

One thing young people and older people have in common is a desire to be left alone to do their own thing, provided that they are not causing trouble to others. People like Emma and her friends are not. They do not want to be told that they can go to one place but not another. They do not want to be cajoled, corralled and organised by the state — they get enough of that at school. They certainly do not want to be disadvantaged as a group because those in charge — you — are unable to deal appropriately with a tiny minority of troublemakers in their midst.

EDIT: Adrian sends me a link to the council’s proposal [PDF, 55 kb] which contains a few real gems – as he puts it:

I really have no idea how they can write things like this with a straight face:

“It is normal practice to provide handrails to assist pedestrians. However, these have purposely been omitted from the proposals, as they could provide loiterers with something to lean against.”

and then,

“The scheme will cater for all sections of the local community.”

Wow.

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 by campaigners who say the device, which emits a high-pitched sound that targets under 25 year olds, is not a fair or reasonable solution for tackling anti-social behaviour. The campaign… is calling for the end to the use of ultra-sonic dispersal device. There are estimated to be 3,500 used across the country.

The BUZZ OFF campaign will be driven by young people who have been affected by the device and will aim to provoke debate and thought amongst parents, government, businesses, the police and others about the increasingly negative way society views and deals with children and young people.

The government has said it has no plans to ban the Mosquito.

The main point here is of course that the use of the Mosquito is in effect discriminatory architecture, designed to punish/annoy/prevent/target one particular group of people, whether or not those individuals have actually done anything wrong – as Sir Albert told the BBC:

These devices are indiscriminate and target all children and young people, including babies, regardless of whether they are behaving or misbehaving.

It’s the same mentality as removing benches because you don’t like the sort of people who use benches (or demonstrated by other techniques in this area). Many different points of view on the subject have been expressed by commenters here over the last couple of years, from kids fed up with being assumed guilty, to members of the public fed up with kids hanging around and intimidating people.

As with blue lighting in public toilets, the Mosquito is unlikely to solve the ‘problem’ at hand: it will simply move it elsewhere. It’s displacing the symptom rather than curing the illness, and – as has been pointed out in numerous recent news stories – it exemplifies a pervasive antipathy towards young people which is rather disturbing (I mentioned this before in reference to the “device to stop young people congregating” search query which led someone to this site.) Liberty’s Shami Chakrabarti – while I don’t always agree with everything she says – puts it very concisely:

What type of society uses a low-level sonic weapon on its children?
Imagine the outcry if a device was introduced that caused blanket discomfort to people of one race or gender, rather than to our kids.

The Mosquito has no place in a country that values its children and seeks to instill them with dignity and respect.

Incidentally, the 15 kHz, 17.5 kHz and 20 kHz wave files which I put on this site a couple of years ago before coming across the Mosquito-inspired Teen Buzz ringtone still bring more search engine traffic than any other article (the mobile phone moisture-detection stickers are a close second). If you’re interested in testing your hearing, the Free Mosquito Ringtones site has since done a better job with a wide range of frequencies.

Top image from Compound Security’s website; Buzz Off logo from Children’s Commissioner press release [Word document].

Now, this is not in the same league, but interesting nonetheless: a ‘game’ to teach children (4 years onwards) spelling using a poka-yoke technique. The Spellmaster, from J W Spear & Sons – the example here is from 1980 (the Enfield factory was closed after a Mattel takeover in 1994) featured eighty plastic letter tiles, Scrabble-like but larger, with raised pegs underneath, a different pattern for each letter.

The letter tiles are used to spell the names of objects and concepts (colours, numbers) illustrated on punched cards which fit onto a backing board, the tiles only fitting in their spaces correctly if the pegs pattern aligns perfectly with the punched holes. If the wrong letter is used, the tile doesn’t fit properly and sits at an angle rather than snapping neatly into place. The ‘snap’ of a correctly positioned letter is actually pretty satisfying – surprisingly so, given the combination of plastic (urea formaldehyde, I think) and 30-year old cardboard.

Left: The wrong tile – the pegs do not align with the punched holes. Right: The correct tile – everything lines up. Below: The wrong tile here – note the extra peg on the left-hand edge of the tile, which doesn’t match up with the punched hole, and leads to the tile not sitting down properly.

Letters which could work either way up, such as ‘o’ and ‘s’ have – as would be hoped – symmetrical peg patterns. It’s a simple system, but it’s clever and while not offering any ‘remedial’ function to the child, I would think it’s not too likely that many children would try all 25 other letters assuming the first one didn’t fit. Hence, there is some bias against pure trial-and-error. It’s interesting to think how immediately we might consider a computer-based solution to this kind of design brief today, where a purely physical one would work very well and give a different kind of tactile satisfaction.

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 any time of year – summer especially. Shown last month at Made in Brunel – I hope Matthew finds a way to take the project forward.

Is the requiring-exercise-to-get-a-reward strategy an architecture of control? I think so, and I think this product exemplifies why and how it is possible to use ‘control’ for the benefit of the user. Sure, society benefits when children grow up more healthily, but the children (and their parents) also benefit. And Snowdown actively rewards the user for his or her effort.

We’ve seen this thinking, specifically regarding encouraging exercise, embodied before on the blog in two products, as far as I can remember: Gillian Swan’s Square-Eyes (also from Brunel), and, of course, the Entertrainer. Both of these use television as the ‘reward’ for exercise – in the case of Square-Eyes, 100 steps on the special insole equate to 1 minute of TV time (controlled by a base station); with the Entertrainer, the user’s heart rate is monitored (you can set the level of exercise you want) and the TV’s volume is controlled, which is an interesting concept: you exercise watching the TV, keeping your heart rate within the optimal range:

The chest strap heart monitor wirelessly relays your heart rate to the Entertrainer™. The Entertrainer then determines if your heart rate is within, above, or below your target zone. If your heart rate is low, the Entertrainer lowers the volume on your television (or other infrared remotely controlled device). If your heart rate is within the target zone (range), the volume remains at a comfortable level. If your heart rate is too high, the volume increases.

Stanford’s Captology research group has also investigated exercise-promotion persuasive technology extensively (e.g. here) but I’m not sure to what extent actual ‘control’ is involved, as opposed to persuasion through making exercise more attractive/fun.

 
Square-Eyes by Gillian Swan, using special insoles and a control unit

The Entertrainer (image from theentertrainer.com)

Nevertheless, with all the above examples, the element of control is very much something the user opts into (unless, say, parents were to force their kids to use Square-Eyes or have no TV) rather than having it imposed with no choice. The ‘code’ is embedded in the product architecture, but you make a choice to use the product because you want the discipline it can help give you.

And again, Snowdown stands out, since it is something fun in itself. Indeed, it may be stretching it to see it as any more a control example than any other children’s toy which requires exercise (bicycle, trampoline, rollerskates, etc). If I hadn’t seen Matthew’s description which specifically highlighted the product’s ability to promote exercise in children, I probably wouldn’t have considered it in this light at all. And it’s perhaps this ‘mindless margin’ (to quote Brian Wansink) of helping yourself while not feeling that you’re being ‘controlled’, which might lie behind positive, successful, ethical, useful applications of architectures of control in design as opposed to the generally anti-user spirit with which the majority are imbued.

But its ViewFinder image gallery website* sadly falls into the trap of trying to restrict public engagement rather than make it easy. Yes, someone specified the old ‘right click disabled‘ policy:

Screenshots of this page, launched from this page.

Now, the image in question – here’s a direct link – which happens to be an engraving of the former Datchet bridge**, in 1840 according to this page (with a colour image) is, even taking English Heritage’s “1860-1922” suggested date range, surely out of copyright, so presumably there cannot be any ‘legal’ question over ‘letting’ people save a copy (which is easiest to do by right-clicking on the most common operating systems and browsers). Using Javascript to remove the browser toolbars and menus also hides the ability to print the image for most users, presumably also deliberately.

Yes, of course, many (most?) readers of this post will know how to get around the no-right-click architecture of control, but you’re reading a technology blog; think of whom the site is presumably aimed at. It is supposed to be a resource to encourage public engagement with history and heritage. Most users will be computer-literate enough to know how to search and probably familiar with right-clicking, but not to mess round with selectively disabling Javascript. Why should they have to? Incidentally, if you do disable Javascript entirely, you can’t even view an enlarged image at all:

What actual use to the public, other than for momentary on-screen interest, is a photo archive website where nothing can be ‘done’ with the images? What is a child doing a local history project supposed to do? Order a print at £18.80 for each photo and then scan it in? Does English Heritage really think that the ability for someone to save or print or e-mail a low-resolution 72 dpi image is going to devalue or compete with the organisation in some way?

It’s ridiculous: such a short-sighted, narrow-mindset policy removes a significant proportion of the usefulness of the site. I don’t know whether the site developer did this with or without English Heritage’s instruction or cognizance (and it was in 2002, so perhaps different thinking would apply today), but it seems that no-one bothered to think through what an actual user might want to get from interacting with the site.

In fact, regardless of the fact that this particular image (as with many others on the site) is in the public domain, even the images which are still under copyright (or “© English Heritage.NMR” as the site puts it, NMR being the National Monuments Record) should, of course, be freely downloadable, printable, and do-whatever-you-want-able. Their acquisition, preservation and cataloguing were paid for by the public, and they should all be available as widely, and easily, as possible. As it is, I would call the website a waste of public money, since it does not appear to offer what most intended users would expect and need.

Still, at least the site’s not one giant bundle of Flash. That would make it marginally more hassle to extract the images.

*Partially funded by the Big Lottery Fund, and thus not entirely directly taxpayer-funded, unless one regards the National Lottery as an extra tax on the hopeful and desperate, which some commentators would.
**Almost exactly the spot where I’ve been testing a prototype radio-controlled toy for a client this very afternoon, in fact, though the bridge is long gone.

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 visitors can be encouraged to think more about the work on display.

Slipping information into play

Frankie – who works for London’s Science Museum – notes the approach of using interactive games or exhibits with forcing functions to (force?-)feed the user information whilst playing: users are “surreptitiously slipped educational information whilst they’re having fun”:

Museums often try to force visitor behaviour in order to achieve learning outcomes, sometimes more successfully than others. A common example of this is a game – designed to appeal to children – which has factual text embedded within it. The ‘Mobile Mayhem’ game included within our recent Dead Ringers exhibition is a typical example. The gameplay, essentially about pressing the right buttons at the right time, is bookended by some factual paragraphs about mobile phone recycling. By revealing the content word by word, and making the screens unskippable until the whole paragraph has been displayed, the player is meant to be forced to read the text, and hence to take in the new and educational information.

The Mobile Mayhem game, from the Science Museum’s Dead Ringers exhibition website. In the screen shown in the first image, educational text appears word by word, forcing the reader to read it (or at least wait for it to be revealed) before proceeding to the actual game.

The word by word revealing of text is familiar from so many indistinguishable Powerpoint presentations (usually accompanied by that awful typewriter noise, of course), and seeing it used in a ‘control’ context makes me wonder how many speakers/lecturers/managers intentionally (even if subconsciously) reveal their dull text or bullet points word by word so that the audience is forced to stick with the information in the order it’s presented and not read (or think) ahead? I’ve had a few teachers and lecturers in my time who used a bit of paper to cover up parts of OHP transparencies they didn’t want us to read yet, in the hope that we’d pay more attention to what they were saying, and I remember how much that used to irritate me (I like reading ahead!), but I understand why they did it.

Relating back to my recent look at forcing functions in textbooks, Frankie makes the point that:

The problem is, of course, that it’s not that difficult to ignore the education and just focus on the game… it’s pretty impossible for software to actually evaluate educational ‘understanding’, and so attempting to force can be somewhat disingenuous.

[As an aside - and this is something I really should develop in a separate post - there does, equally, come a point where our understanding of how other people understand ideas and concepts makes a one size-fits-all evaluation very difficult. I expect someone has done a study like this (I do hope so - I'd love to read it), but wouldn't it be fascinating to find out whether certain ways of understanding (or visualising) certain concepts help certain people think laterally and draw conclusions that others have missed? For example, this is Richard Feynman, in 'It's as Simple as One, Two, Three':

When I see equations, I see the letters in colors - I don't know why. As I'm talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel functions... with light-tan js, slightly violet-bluish ns and dark brown xs flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students.

I first noted that quote down a few years ago when reading a collection of Feynman's essays, as I'd always had the same kind of very mild grapheme-colour synæsthesia that the quote implies, but I wonder whether the phenomenon actually helped Feynman structure mentally and remember mathematical concepts? And can we learn from it in designing educational systems? Anyway, I'll come back to that idea in a future, more relevant, post!]

Encouraging visitors to think

 
Left: When issued with a booklet explaining artwork on display, many visitors walk around reading this before forming their own impressions of the work. This is an exhibition at Uxbridge’s Beldam Gallery in 2002. Right: Displaying work with no explanatory text, captions or booklets compels visitors to make their own judgments and form their own interpretations of the work (or ignore it, but that’s something of a judgment in itself). This is Dave Cranmer’s Pixelly Paintings at the Foundry, London, in 2002.

Josh’s post argues that many museums and galleries would better fulfil their educational and inspirational potential if they encouraged visitors to think more about what they are looking at, rather than spoon-feeding them information and an ‘established’ opinion – especially pertinent to art:

My wife Ellen is an art historian and a professional museumgoer. She tells me that museum visitors commonly spend more time reading wall texts than looking at the art… It’s a law of interface behavior that users will always follow the path of least resistance. Looking at art is hard. Many find it intimidating, unfamiliar, uncomfortable. It’s easier to read wall text, go shopping or listen to audio commentary than it is to actually face down the work itself.

The interface is broken.

The support materials should be less prominent. What a work “means” or why it’s “important” is second-order information. The important experience is simply to look at the work, to absorb its sensual impact. Respond to it, rather than study it like a schoolbook. For lots of visitors, though, the support materials seem to distract, reducing the time that visitors take to reflect on the works.

The design question: How do you get people to consider the art instead of plunging into its documentation?

As Josh notes, there are designers who think entirely the opposite, and long for more structured lead-ins in galleries, with the artwork’s title and rationale defined clearly up-front. (The always-interesting David Friedman subverts the concept further.)

I can see both points of view. When I was very young I used to get frustrated visiting ‘traditional’ museums that really interested me (mostly motor museums and those with technology) because there was rarely a pre-defined route around them, and I wanted to see everything. When you’re a little kid, zig-zagging across a room from one side to the other to make sure you don’t miss anything out can be difficult, especially when every other visitor is much taller than you and the room seems intimidatingly large. I remember thinking how a museum with displays only along one wall, so that you had to look at them in a certain order, would be good. Now, of course, I would tend to see that as excessive control, and want to be able to miss out things that don’t interest me, and indeed, form my own interpretations of what’s on display.

Josh goes on to give the example of a fairly simple compromise which both allows the visitor to form his or her own interpretations of the work, and to read interpretations if desired:

I think that it would be better to make wall text less prominent, encouraging visitors to spend their time with the art instead.

The modern art museum in Paris, the Centre Pompidou, uses an architecture of control that does just that. Each gallery has a stand with a set of cards offering commentary on the works in the gallery. The wall text is limited only to title, artist and materials. The behavior of museumgoers changes: People walk into the gallery, and spend time with the works. Afterward, those who are curious to learn more go retrieve a card and return to look at the works some more after reading about them.

The educational and background materials are still there, but presented in a way that still encourages people to confront the works first.

It’s interesting that this really does apparently change people’s behavior. (An alternative might be to have more information under a hinged flap on the wall or a pedestal so that only those who want/feel the need to have an established opinion on the piece end up reading it. Or perhaps even the title, artist and materials could be listed under the flap, so that visitors who want to form entirely independent opinions aren’t even swayed by the pieces’ titles or the artists’ names.)

Would you feel cheated if you visited an art gallery and there were no interpretation or explanation of the pieces available at all? Before it became so well-known, how many people picked up The Catcher In the Rye (with its famously sparse blurb-less covers) from a library shelf and put it back, unable to make a commitment to reading it without having an idea what it was about?

Of course, the argument can shift considerably when the subject is a museum dedicated to educating visitors about the exhibits and why they are important, rather than an art gallery, but the principle that Josh outlines of the visitor interfacing (as it were) directly with the exhibit, whether that’s a painting (and the interfacing is figuring out one’s own response to it) or a hands-on science experiment, or anything in between, has a good degree of commonality. The ‘middle man’, the filter of best-fit interpretation drawn up to fit on the standard-size card and fit standard-size opinions, is stripped out.

The Science Museum does a fantastic job of explaining concepts and opening visitors’ eyes to things they actively want to understand, but may never have known how to approach before. It doesn’t tell them how to think about something, but allows them to find out things they didn’t know, and thing more about the things they thought they did know. There is a difference. Bristol’s Exploratory, sadly now closed, was immensely inspirational to me as a child: this was somewhere where all learning was through actual interaction with the (mostly physics-based) exhibits plores.

As we’ve noted before, much of education is about changing behaviour, even if we define the behaviour we want to change as “being ignorant”. Control is one way of attempting to force a change in behaviour, manipulative persuasion is another (thanks Toby) but allowing people to learn because something interests them cuts out the necessity to use force or deceit. If you can make something interesting, you overcome the resistance.