Review: Katyal, N. K. “Architecture as Crime Control”, Yale Law Journal, March 2002, Vol 111, Issue 5.

Professor Neal Kumar Katyal of Georgetown University Law School, best-known for being (successful) lead counsel in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case dealing with Guantanamo Bay detainees, has also done some important work on the use of design as a method of law enforcement in both the digital and built environments.

This article, ‘Architecture as Crime Control’, specifically addresses itself to a legal and social policy-maker audience in terms of the areas of focus and the arguments used, but is also very relevant to architects and designers open to being enlightened about the strategic value of their work. Specifically with regard to ‘architectures of control’ and ‘design for behaviour change’, as one might expect, there are many useful examples and a great deal of interesting analysis. In this review, I will try to concentrate on examples and design techniques given in the article, along with some of the thinking behind them – the most useful aspects from the point of view of my own research – rather than attempting to analyse the legal and sociological framework into which all of this fits.

Katyal starts by acknowledging how the “emerging field of cyberlaw, associated most directly with Lawrence Lessig” has brought the idea of ‘code’ constraining behaviour to a level of greater awareness, but suggests that the greater permanence and endurance of architectural changes in the real world – the built environment – may actually give greater potential for behaviour control, as opposed to the “infinitely malleable” architecture of cyberspace:

It is time to reverse-engineer cyberlaw’s insights, and to assess methodically whether changes to the architecture of our streets and buildings can reduce criminal activity.

A theme to which Katyal returns throughout the article is that the policy response to James Wilson and George Kelling’s influential ‘Broken Windows’ – “an architectural problem in crime control” – has largely been a law enforcement one (“prosecution of minor offenses like vandalism in an attempt to deter these ‘gateway crimes’”) instead of actual architectural responses, which, Katyal argues, could have a significant and useful role in this field.

Design principles

Before tackling specific architectural strategies, Katyal discusses the general area of using “design principles” to “influence, in subtle ways, the paths by which we live and think” – a great summary of many of the techniques we’ve considered on this blog over the last couple of years, though not all have been subtle – and gives some good examples:

Fast food restaurants use hard chairs that quickly grow uncomfortable so that customers rapidly turn over

Image from Headphonaught’s Flickr stream

Elevator designers place the numerals and floor indicator lights over people’s heads so that they avoid eye contact and feel less crowded

Supermarkets have narrow aisles so that customers cannot easily talk to each other and must focus on the products instead

(We’ve also seen the opposite effect cited, i.e. using wider aisles to cause customers to spend longer in a particular aisle – clearly, both effects could be employed in different product areas within the same supermarket, to suit whatever strategy the retailer has. There are plenty of other tricks too.)

And, in a footnote, Katyal cites Personal Space by Robert Sommer, which provides:

other examples, such as a café that hired an architect to design a chair that placed “disagreeable pressure on the spine if occupied for over a few minutes” and Conrad Hilton’s decision to move couches out of hotel lobbies to minimise the number of lingering visitors.

(Sommer’s work sounds interesting and relevant, and I look forward to investigating it*)

As Katyal puts it, “with strategies like these, private architects are currently engaging in social control.”

Moving on to architectural strategies for crime control, Katyal expounds four ‘mechanisms’ identified in the field of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED):

Design should:

(1) Create opportunities for natrual surveillance by residents, neighbors and bystanders;

(2) Instill a sense of territoriality so that residents develop proprietary attitudes and outsiders feel deterred from entering a private space;

(3) Build communities and avoid social isolation;

(4) Protect targets of crime.

Before expanding on the practical and legal application of each of these mechanisms, Katyal makes the point that while they can often “work in synergy… natural surveillance is most effective when social isolation is minimized and when design delays the perpetration of crime,” there can be conflicts and any strategy needs to be developed within the context of the community in which it is going to be applied:

Effective design requires input by the community. Without such input, security features are likely to be resented, taken down or evaded (consider the ‘security’ doors propped open on campuses today.

(This issue of ‘resentment’ or even ‘inconvenience’ is, I feel, going to be a significant factor in my own studies of environmentally beneficial behaviour-changing products; we shall see.)

Natural surveillance

The idea of natural surveillance is to create situations where areas are overlooked by neighbours, other residents and so on, with the effect being both a crime deterrent (if the criminal knows he is being watched, or might be watched, he may decide against the crime) and to improve the effectiveness of solving the crime afterwards (someone will have seen what happened). Katyal cites Jane Jacobs‘ argument that diversity of use can be an important way of bringing about natural surveillance – preferably with different activities occurring throughout the day, to ensure that there is always a population there to keep any eye on things. However, short of this kind of deliberate diversity planning, there are specific techniques that can be used on individual buildings and their surroundings to increase natrual surveillance; Katyal suggests the addition of windows facing onto public spaces, ensuring sight lines down corridors and alleyways, positioning windows so that neighbours can watch each other’s houses, bringing parking areas in front of stores rather than out of sight behind them, and making sure hallways and lobbies are clearly visible to passers-by. He gives the example of redesigning the layout of a school’s grounds to increase the opportunity for natural surveillance:

Images from Katyal, N. K. “Architecture as Crime Control”, Yale Law Journal, March 2002, Vol 111, Issue 5.

[In the first image] the informal areas are blocked form sight and far from school grounds. Because no central place for congregation exists, students are spread over the grounds, and there is insufficient density for monitoring. The four open entrances and exits facilitate access to the school and escape.
…
[In the second image,] through the designation of formal gathering areas, other places become subtly off-limits to students. Indeed, those who are present in such areas are likely to attract suspicion…. the formal gathering areas are naturally surveilled by building users… [and] are long and thin, running alongside the school windows, and two hedges prevent students from going fuarther away. Moreover, the west entrance, which had the least potential for surveillance, has been closed…

Lighting can also be a major method of increasing natural surveillance:

First, it helps anyone viewing a situation to see it more clearly and thereby deters some crimes by increasing the powers of perception of those watching. Second, it encourages people to be in the area in the first place because the greater visibility creates a sense of security. The more eyes on the street, the more visibility constrains crime.

(Incidentally, Katyal comments – having interviewed an architect – that the use of yellow street lighting “can increase the crime rate by making streets (and individuals on them) look menacing”, hence a tendency for some urban developers to move to white lighting instead.)

Territoriality

Territoriality – also much of the focus of defensible space (which I’ll discuss in a later post) – “both provides an incentive for residents to take care of and monitor an area and subtly deters offenders by warning them that they are about to enter a private space.” Some of Katyal’s examples are wonderfully simple:

Building community

The third main mechanism, building community, is also heavily interlinked with the idea of defensible space. The aim here is to encourage a sense of community, by creating spaces which cause people to interact, or even reducing the number of dwellings in each individual set so that people are more likely to recognise and come to know their neighbours – something many architects have instinctively tried to do anyway over the past 20 years or so, though not always explicitly with crime reduction in mind:

…even the placement of seats and benches can bring people together or divide them, creating what architects call, respectively, sociopetal and sociofugal spaces. Some architects self-consciously create sociofugal spaces by, for example, designing chairs in airports that make it difficult for people to talk to each other.

Practically, ‘building community’ would necessarily appear to be slightly more nebulous than some of the other mechanisms, but even techniques such as encouraging people to spend more time in communal areas such as a laundry (and hence potentially interact more) can be important here.

Strengthening targets

There are a number of simple examples of target hardening or strengthening given:

Interestingly, Katyal makes the point that where potential crime targets can be strengthened without making it overly obvious that this has been done, the benefits may be greater:

Modern technology permits targets to be hardened in ways that are not obvious to the public. Strong plastics, graffiti-resistant paint, and doors with steel cores are a few examples. These allow architects to disguise their efforts at strengthening targets and thus avoid sending a message that crime is rampant.
…
Some forms of target hardening are suboptimal in that visibility evinces a fear of crime that can cause damage to the fabric of a community and even increase crime rates.

He again later returns to this point:

Subtle architecture that gently reinfoces law-abiding norms and prevents a degree of intrusion is to be preferred to explicit and awkward physical barricades that reflect the feeling that a community is under siege. Cheap wire fences do not express a belief in the power of law or norms; rather, they reflect the opposite. The same can be said for ugly iron bars on windows, which express the terror of crime as powerfully as does any sign or published crime statistic.
…
A whole host of architectural strategies – such as the placement of doors and windows, creation of semipublic congregation spaces, street layout alterations, park redesign, and many more – sidestep creating an architecture dominated by the expression of fear. Indeed, cheap barricades often substitute for these subtler measures. Viewed this way, gated communities are a byproduct of public disregard of architecture, not a sustainable solution to crime.[my emphasis]

(This last point is especially interesting to me – I must admit I am fascinated by the phenomenon of gated communities and what effect they have on their inhabitants as well as on the surrounding area, both in a Ballardian sense (Running Wild, Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes) and, more prosaically, in terms of what this voluntary separation does to the community outside the gates. See also the quote from architect John Thompson in my forthcoming post reporting what’s happening at the former Brunel Runnymede Campus)

Other aspects

One point to which Katyal repeatedly returns is – a corollary of the above – the concept of architectural solutions as entities which subtly reinforce or embody norms (desirable ones, from the point of view of law enforcement) rather than necessarily enforce them in totality:

Even the best social codes are quite useless if it is impossible to observe whether people comply with them. Architecture, by facilitating interaction and monitoring by members of a community, permits social norms to have greater impact. In this way, the power of architecture to influence social norms can even eclipse that of law, for law faces obvious difficulties when it attempts to regulate social interaction directly.

…

Architecture can prevent crimes even when criminals believe the probability of enforcement is low… one feature of social norms strategies is that they are often self-enforcing.

I think this is a crucial point, and is applicable in other ‘architectures of control’ techniques outside of the built environment and the specific issues of crime. Norms can be extremely powerful influencers of behaviour, and – to take my current research on changing user behaviour to reduce environmental impact – the ability to design a desirable norm into a product or system, without taking away the user’s sense of ownership of, and confidence in, the product, may well turn out to be the crux of the matter.

As (I hope) will be clear, much of Katyal’s analysis seems applicable to other areas of ‘Design for/against X’ where human factors are involved – not just design against crime. So, for example, here Katyal is touching on something close to the concepts of perceived affordances (and disaffordances) in interaction design:

Psychological evidence shows that criminals decode environmental ‘cues’ to assess the likelihood of success of a given criminal act… the design of a meeting table influences who will speak and when, and who is perceived to have a positionof authority. It is therefore no great shock that the eight months of negotiation that preceded the 1969 Paris Peace Talks largely centred on what the physical space of the negotiating table would be. It is said that Machiavelli designed a political meeting chamber with a ceiling that looked asif it were about to collapse, reasoning that it would induce politicians to vote quickly and leave.
…
Winston Churchill… went so far as to claim that the shape of the House [of Commons] was essential to the two-party system and that its small size was critical for ‘free debate’:
…
“The party system is much favoured by the oblong form of chamber… the act of crossing the floor is one which requires serious consideration. I am well informed on this matter, for I have accomplished that difficult process, not only once but twice.”

Significant points are also made is about displacement (or “geographic substitution”) of crime: do architectual measures (especially target hardening and obvious surveillance, we might assume) not simply move crime elsewhere? (We’ve discussed this before when looking at blue lighting in public toilets.) Katyal argues that, while some displacement will, of course, occur, this is not always direct substitution. Locally-based criminals may not have knowledge of other areas (i.e. the certainty that these will not be hardened or surveilled targets), or indeed, where crime is opportunistic, the “costs” imposed by travelling elsewhere to commit it are too high. Equally:

Many devices, such as steel-reinforced doors, strong plastics, and the like are not discernible until a criminal has invested some energy and time. These forms of precaution will thus increase expected perpetration cost and deter offenders without risking substantial displacement.

Also, the fact that increased police presence (for example) in a crime ‘hot-spot’ may also lead to crime displacement, is generally not seen as a reason for not increasing that presence: some targets simply are more desirable to protect than others, and where architectural measures allow police to concentrate elsewhere, this may even be an advantage.

More specific examples

Aside from the analysis, there are a great many architectures of control and persuasion examples dotted throughout Katyal’s article, and while they are somewhat disparate in how I present them here, they are all worth noting from my point of view, and I hope interesting. Apart from those I’ve already quoted above, some of the other notable examples and observations are:

Summary

Ultimately, Katyal’s aim seems to be to encourage policy-makers to see architectural measures as a potentially important aspect of crime reduction, given sensible analysis of each situation, and he suggests the use of Crime Impact Statements – possibly as a requirement for all new development – in a similar vein to Environmental Impact Statements, and leading to similar increases in awareness among architects and developers. Building codes and zoning policies could also be directed towards crime reduction through architectural strategies. Insurance companies, by understanding what measures ‘work’ and which don’t, could use premiums to favour, promote and educate property owners, similarly to the way that widespread adoption of better design for fire protection and prevention was significantly driven by insurance companies.

In this sense, a public (i.e. governmental) commitment to use of architectural strategies in this way would make the process much more transparent than individual private developers adopting ad hoc measures, and, with sensible analysis of each case, could assist local law enforcement and engage communities in reinforcing ‘desirable’ norms and ‘designing away’ some aspects of their problems – though Katyal makes it very clear that architecture alone cannot do this [my emphasis]:

None of this should be mistaken for architectural determinism or its derivative belief that good buildings alone will end crime. These hopes of ‘salvation by bricks’ are illusory. But our rejection of this extreme should not lead us to the opposite extreme view, which holds that physical settings are irrelevant to human beliefs and action. Architecture influences behavior; it does not determine it.

*Katyal also later cites Sommer’s Social Design for the example of airports that “prevent crime by replacing bathroom entrance doors with right-angle entrances that permit the warning sounds of crime to travel more freely and that reduce the sense of isolation”. I’d always assumed that (as with the toilet facilities in many motorway services here in the UK), this was to reduce the number of surfaces that a toilet user would have to touch – a similar strategy to having the entrance doors to public toilet areas pushable/elbowable/nudgable by users leaving the area, rather than forcing recently-washed hands to come into contact with a pull-handle which may not be especially clean. See also Sara Cantor’s thoughts on encouraging handwashing.

Very neatly linking the themes of the last two posts (devices to make users aware of their energy use, and intentionally uncomfortable seating) is the Design and Punishment chair by Ben Cunningham, a Three Dimensional Design graduate from the Arts Institute at Bournemouth.

Simply, the concept is a chair which progressively collapses as the user’s home energy use becomes excessive, and restores itself when corrective action is taken (such as turning devices off):

Chairs are designed to support a person’s weight: this is taken for granted, but what if that feature were taken away from the user until they have done their bit? This is a way of forcefully highlighting the issue, so they cannot ignore it any more.

The idea is for a range of products with similar ideas – one of Ben’s lecturers, Christian McLening, also mentioned to me the idea of a light cord that retracts gradually the more energy is used, and a bookshelf that similarly tilts gradually. The light cord sounds intriguing, but by making the cord more difficult to reach (to turn it off), it perhaps signifies the opposite of what’s intended. Along the lines of what Crosbie Fitch suggested here, lights which gradually dimmed as the house’s energy consumption increased might be an interesting alternative. But Ben’s aim was very much to play with the ‘punishment’ aspect:

Design and Punishment was, to begin with, a look at designing a product that could make saving energy in the home easier through better awareness. The products force the user to cut down on their energy consumption. Instead of trying to make energy saving easier, the range of products forces the user to save [energy] or suffer a punishment.

Again, the line between forcing the user (physically) to behave in a certain way, and persuading him or her to change behaviour, is not a distinct one; as Toby commented here, both are methods of control, and both are powerful, but in cases such as this where the user would have to choose to purchase the chair voluntarily (Ben’s chair is only a concept product, but the principle stands), the persuasion/coercion would be two/three-pronged: inspiring the purchase in the first place/motivating the user to use it where more convenient alternatives are available, and the actual forcing aspect when the user’s behaviour is changed, rather than the product being abandoned in frustration/annoyance.

J G Ballard, Super-Cannes, chapter 29:

Thousands of people live and work here without making a single decision about right and wrong. The moral order is engineered into their lives along with the speed limits and the security systems.

Re-reading Ballard’s excellent Super-Cannes, since the way the winter afternoon sunlight suddenly caught a building a few days ago made me think sharply, momentarily, of the vast technology parks of Sophia-Antipolis. The above quote describes, essentially, architecture of control in a structural, sub-surface, context: in the sense of Robert Moses‘ low bridges, perhaps. Not just artefacts with politics, but entire environments and systems with agendas.

More on Ballard at the brilliant Ballardian.

(This is the first Friday quote for a long time. In fact there’s only been one previously; I’ll try to make it a regular feature of the blog. They won’t always be about architectures of control, but I’ll endeavour to make sure they’re always interesting.)

Blue lighting is sometimes used in public toilets (restrooms) to make it more difficult for drug users to inject themselves (veins are harder to see). The above implementation is in Edinburgh, next to the Tron Kirk.

It was more difficult to see my veins through my skin, but there was normal-coloured lighting in the street outside, and one would assume that the users would thus just go outside instead, though the risk of detection is greater. (An additional result of the blue lighting is that, on going outside after spending more than a few seconds in the toilets, the daytime world appears much brighter and more optimistic, even on an overcast day: could retail designers or others make use of this effect? Do they already?)

So the blue lighting ‘works’, but is it really a good idea to increase the risk that an injection will be done wrongly – maybe multiple times? This is perhaps a similar argument to that surrounding delibrately reducing visibility at junctions: the architecture of control makes it more dangerous for the few users (and those their actions affect) who ignore or bypass the control. This seems to be an architecture of control with the potential to endanger life, although the actual stated intention behind it probably includes ‘saving lives’.

Without knowing more about addiction, however, I can’t say whether making it difficult for people to inject will really help stop them doing it; it would seem more likely that (as in the linked Argus story), the aim of the blue lighting is to move the ‘problem’ somewhere else rather than actually ‘solve’ it – as with the anti-homeless benches, in fact.

Another example in this kind of area is the use of smoke alarms specifically to prevent people smoking in toilets, e.g. on aeroplanes (the noise, and embarrassment, is a sufficient deterrent). There’s even been the suggestion of using the Mosquito high-pitched alarm coupled to a smoke detector to ‘prevent’ children smoking in school toilets (I’d expect that quite a few would deliberately try to set them off; I know I would have as a kid). A friend mentioned the practice of siting smoking shelters a long way from office buildings so that smokers are discouraged from going so often; this backfired for the company concerned, as smokers just took increasingly long breaks to make it ‘worth their while’ to walk the extra distance.

Bruce Schneier talks about ‘Architecture and Security’: architectural decisions based on the immediate fear of certain threats (e.g. car bombs, rioters) continuing to affect users of the buildings long afterwards. And he makes the connexion to architectures of control outside of the built environment, too:

“The same thing can be seen in cyberspace as well. In his book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Lawrence Lessig describes how decisions about technological infrastructure — the architecture of the internet — become embedded and then impracticable to change. Whether it’s technologies to prevent file copying, limit anonymity, record our digital habits for later investigation or reduce interoperability and strengthen monopoly positions, once technologies based on these security concerns become standard it will take decades to undo them.

It’s dangerously shortsighted to make architectural decisions based on the threat of the moment without regard to the long-term consequences of those decisions.”

Indeed.

The commenters detail a fantastic array of ‘disciplinary architecture‘ examples, including:

I’m especially amused by the “making it painful for hippies to walk barefoot” comment! This is not too far from the anti-skateboarding corrugation sometimes used (e.g. the third photo here), though it seems that in our current era, there is a more obvious disconnect between ‘security’ architecture (which may also involve vast surveillance or everyware networks, such as the City of London’s Ring of Steel) and that aimed at stopping ‘anti-social’ behaviour, such as homeless people sleeping, skateboarders, or just young people congregating.

“Merseyside Police’s new anti-social behaviour (ASB) task force is exploring a number of technology-driven ideas.

But while the use of surveillance drones is among them, they would be a “long way off”, police said.
…

“The idea of the drone is a long way off, but it is about exploring all technological possibilities to support our war on crime and anti-social behaviour.”

Note that “anti-social behaviour” is mentioned separately to “crime.” Why? Also, nice appropriation of the “war on xxx” phrasing.

“It plans to utilise the latest law enforcement technology, including automatic number plate recognition (ANPR), CCTV “head-cams” and metal-detecting gloves.”

This country’s had it.

We’ve got Avon & Somerset Police using helicopters with high-intensity floodlights to “blind groups of teenagers temporarily” and councils using tax-payers’ money to install devices to cause deliberate auditory pain to a percentage of the population, again, whether or not they have committed a crime. Anyone would think that those in power despised their public. Perhaps they do.

Has it ever occurred to the police that tackling the causes of the problem might be a better solution than attacking the symptoms with a ridiculous battery of ‘technology’?

Image from Monkeys & Kiwis (Flickr)

Chris Weightman let me know about how it felt to watch last Thursday’s iPod Flashmob at London’s Liverpool Street station: the dominant sense was of a mass of people overturning the ‘prescribed’ behaviour designed into an environment, and turning the area into their own canvas, overlaying individualised, externally silent experiences on the usual commuter traffic.

Probably wouldn’t get away with that sort of thing at an airport any more anyway, but what will happen to this kind of informal gathering in the era of the societies of control? When everyware monitors exactly who’s where and forces the barriers closed for anyone hoping to use the space for something other than that for which it was intended?

Signal vs Noise talks about the casino experience – a world awash with designed-in architectures of control, both physical and psychological (and physiological, perhaps), truly environments designed specifically to manipulate and reinforce certain behaviour, from maze-like layouts (intentional route obfuscation – perhaps even more so than in supermarkets) to the deliberate funnelling of winners past many other places to spend their chips on the way to the cashier’s window.

While the commenters (including ‘Hunter’ who runs a blog on casino design) attempt to clarify/debunk some of the more legendary ‘casino tricks’ including restricting daylight and pumping extra oxygen onto the floor, it’s clear that an enormous wealth of expertise has developed over the years to maximise the control of players and thus maximise casinos’ takings.

A couple of months ago, Scott Craver mentioned another interesting casino trick:

“This casino had a cell-phone blocker, and of course our conference room would have no wi-fi. Apparently the goal is to attract people to machines and disconnect them from everything else in the world. From the gambling areas you cannot tell if it is day or night. And the way everything was designed to suck people in had all the subtlety of a mousetrap.”

(Despite spending most of my formative years reading the James Bond books over and over again, and being fascinated by Thomas Bass’s The Newtonian Casino, I’ve only ever actually been in one ‘proper’ casino, in London, and I spent most of that time watching a friend play blackjack and trying to apply what I could remember from Bringing Down The House, so I’m not really very familiar with the subject. But it’s extremely interesting, and worthy of more research – and comparison with other ‘public’ environments.)

*Yeah, it’s a calculated pun!

Images from Yumiko Hayakawa

Yumiko Hayakawa has a very thoughtful and well-illustrated article at OhMyNews on the story behind the variety of ‘anti-homeless’ benches and architectural features (including public art) in Tokyo’s parks and public areas – by making it difficult or impossible to lie down. (We’ve looked briefly before at benches with central armrests before, along with anti-sit devices and of course anti-skateboarding measures – ‘disciplinary architecture‘)

Many of the features, such as the benches shown above and below, are also designed to discourage everyone from spending too long on them, even when sitting normally, by deliberately making them uncomfortable:

“The bench in the photo below may appear to be of modern design, but because of its tubular construction one risks sliding off if not careful.

One should be especially careful if drunk at the time! Made of stainless steel, the benches are hot in summer and cold in winter. The Toshima-ward parks office, which oversees Ikebukuro West Park, home to this bench, describes the bench as “designed to keep with the modern image of the area while at the same time not allowing homeless people to loiter.”

Suggestions that the benches were dangerously slippery and also uncomfortable met with the advice that “people should take the utmost care when sitting on them” and that these benches were only something to lean on or sit on for a few minutes.

That is, they want us to regard the bench as “somewhere you can sit if you have to.” It makes you wonder who would actually want to sit on such a bench.”

There are examples of bus stop ‘perches’ and uncomfortable café seating to discourage loitering from many areas of the world, but it does seem as though Tokyo’s authorities perhaps see inconveniencing all members of the public as merely collateral damage in a ‘war’ against the homeless, which itself is more than simply contentious. Nevertheless, people adapt and find their own ways around discipline. Hayakawa interviewed some homeless people about the benches:

“Most common were the “defeatists,” who gave up on the grounds that the benches were so uncomfortable that it was easier to just lay down a newspaper and sit on the ground. Next most common were the “optimists,” who argued that while they found it a hassle to be unable to sit on benches for a long period of time, it did mean that other park users had to put up with seeing homeless people less. Finally, there were the
“innovators,” who would lie folding their bodies into a V-shape around the central bench divider, or placing bags on either sides of the divider at the same height, or even placing a camping stove underneath the stainless steel tubular bench above to cook and at the same time warm the bench!”

“Do artefacts have politics?” Langdon Winner asked in 1986; the answer is, of course, yes.

“…the sound is being used in a dance track, Buzzin’, with secret melodies only young ears can hear.

…

Simon Morris from Compound Security said: “Following the success of the ringtone, a lot of people were asking us to do a bit more, so we got together with the producers Melodi and they came up with a full-length track.

“It has two harmonies – one that everyone can hear and one that only young people can hear.

“But it works well together or separate,” he added.”

There’s a clip linked from the BBC story, or here directly (WMV format). Can’t say the “secret melodies” are especially exciting (and yes, I can hear it!) but I suppose it’s a clever idea. There could be some interesting steganographic possibilities, and indeed it could be used for ‘cheating in tests’ as Jason Thomas puts it here.

This is the same Simon Morris who’s quoted in an earlier BBC story as saying that teenagers (in general) don’t have a right “to congregate for no specific purpose”, so it’s interesting to see him getting involved with young peoples’ music. Nevertheless, I can see the dilemma that Compound Security are in: they’ve created something designed to be unpleasant for teenagers, but are also capitalising on its potential appeal to teenagers. It’s clever, if rather inconsistent branding practice.

In a recent post, I discussed a Spiked article by Josie Appleton which included the following quote:

“Police in Weston-super-Mare have been shining bright halogen lights from helicopters on to youths gathered in parks and other public places. The light temporarily blinds them, and is intended to ‘move them on’, in the words of one Weston police officer.”

A friend, reading this, simply uttered a single word: “Mirror”.

What’d happen then? Is the risk of a blinded pilot and a crashed helicopter really worth it?

Or perhaps it’s the state, and by extension Avon & Somerset Police (in this case), who are the real blind pilots, attempting to ‘guide’ society in this way? If not blind, they’re certainly short-sighted.

That, succinctly, is what this website’s about: design as something to restrict and control the user, rather than empower and enable. Products that enable you to do less. Products that force you to interact with them in a way which (often) serves someone else’s interest rather than your own.

In my review of Adam Greenfield‘s Everyware a couple of months ago, I mentioned – briefly – the work of Hendricus Loos, whose series of patents cover subjects including “Manipulation of nervous systems by electric fields”, “Subliminal acoustic manipulation of nervous systems”, “Magnetic excitation of sensory resonances” and “Remote magnetic manipulation of nervous systems”. A theme emerges, of which this post by Tom Coates at Plasticbag.org reminded me:

“There was one speaker at FOO this year that would literally have blown my brain away if he’d happened to have had his equipment with him. Ed Boyden talked about transcranial magnetic stimulation – basically how to use focused magnetic fields to stimulate sections of the brain and hence change behaviour. He talked about how you could use this kind of stimulation to improve mood and fight depression, to induce visual phenomena or reduce schizophrenic symptoms, hallucinations and dreams, speed up language processing, improve attention, break habits and improve creativity.

…

He ended by telling the story of one prominent thinker in this field who developed a wand that she could touch against a part of your head and stop you being able to talk. Apparently she used to roam around the laboratories doing this to people. She also apparently had her head shaved and tattooed with all the various areas of the brain and what direct stimulation to them (with a wand) could do to her. She has, apparently, since grown her hair. I’d love to meet her.”

Now, the direct, therapeutic usage of small-range systems such as these is very different to the discipline-at-a-distance proposed in a number of Loos’s patents (where an ‘offender’ can be incapacitated, using, e.g. a magnetic field), but both are architectures of control: systems designed to modify, restrict and control people’s behaviour.

And, I would venture to suggest, a more widespread adoption of magnetic stimulation for therapeutic uses – perhaps, in time, designed into a safe, attractive consumer product for DIY relaxation/stimulation/hallucination – is likely to lead to further experimentation and exploration of ‘control’ applications for law enforcement, crowd ‘management’, and other disciplinary uses. I think we – designers, engineers, tech people, architects, social activists, anyone who values freedom – should be concerned, but the impressive initiative of the Open-rTMS Project will at least ensure that we’re able to understand the technology.

“This is the paradox of social media that has been bothering me lately: an ‘empowering’ media that provides increased opportunities for communication, education and online participation, but which at the same time further isolates individuals and aggregates them into masses —more prone to control, and by extension more prone to discipline.”

Slashdot on ‘A working economy without DRM?’ – same debate as ever, but some very insightful comments

Slashdot on ‘Explaining DRM to a less-experienced PC user’ – I particularly like SmallFurryCreature’s ‘Sugar cube’ analogy

‘The Promise of a Post-Copyright World’ by Karl Fogel – extremely clear analysis of the history of copyright and, especially, the way it has been presented to the public over the centuries

(Via BoingBoing) The Entertrainer – a heart monitor-linked TV controller: your TV stays on with the volume at a usable level only while you keep exercising at the required rate. Similar concept to Gillian Swan’s Square-Eyes

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!

Josie Appleton, at the always-interesting Spiked, takes a look at the increasing systemic hostility towards ‘young people in public places’ in the UK: ‘When did ‘hanging around’ become a social problem?’

As well as the Mosquito, much covered on this site (all posts; try out high frequency sounds for yourself), the article mentions the use of certain music publicly broadcast for the same ‘dispersal’ purpose:

“The Local Government Association (LGA) has compiled a list of naff songs for councils to play in trouble spots in order to keep youths at bay – including Lionel Richie’s ‘Hello’ and St Winifred’s School Choir’s ‘There’s No One Quite Like Grandma’. Apparently the Home Office is monitoring the scheme carefully. This policy has been copied from Sydney, where it is known as the ‘Manilow Method’ (after the king of naff, Barry Manilow), and has precursors in what we might call the ‘Mozart Method’, which was first deployed in Canadian train stations and from 2004 onwards was adopted by British shops (such as Co-op) and train stations (such as Tyne and Wear Metro).”

(I do hope each public broadcast of the music is correctly licensed in accordance with PPL terms and conditions, if only because I don’t want my council tax going to fund a legal battle with PPL. Remember, playing music in public is exactly equivalent to nicking it from a shop, and, after all, that’s the sort of thing that those awful young people do, isn’t it?

I also wonder why there is a difference between a council playing loud music in public, and a member of the public choosing to do so. If kids took along a stereo and played loud music in a shopping centre or any other public place, they’d get arrested or at the very least get moved on.

What would the legal situation be if kids were playing exactly the same music as was also being pumped out of the council-approved/operated speakers, at the same time? It can hardly be described as a public nuisance if it’s no different to what’s happening anyway.

What if kids started playing the same music as was on the speakers, but out-of-synch so that it sounded awful to every passer-by? Maybe shift the pitch a little (couple of semitones down?) so the two tracks overlayed cause a nice ‘drive-away-all-the-customers’ effect? What would happen then? What if kids build a little RF device which pulses repeatedly with sufficient power to superimpose a nice buzz on the council’s speaker output?)

Anyway, Ms Appleton goes on to note a new tactic perhaps even more extreme than the Mosquito, and a sure candidate for my ‘designed to injure‘ category (perhaps not actually endangering life, but close):

“Police in Weston-super-Mare have been shining bright halogen lights from helicopters on to youths gathered in parks and other public places. The light temporarily blinds them, and is intended to ‘move them on’, in the words of one Weston police officer.”

Wow! Roll on the lawsuits. (Nice to know that the local air ambulance relies on charitable donations to stay in the air, while the police apparently have plenty of helicopters available)

The article quotes what increasingly appears to be the official attitude:

“…this isn’t just about teenagers committing crimes: it’s also about them just being there. Before he was diverted into dealing with terror alerts, home secretary John Reid was calling on councils to tackle the national problem of ‘teenagers hanging around street corners’. Apparently unsupervised young people are in themselves a social problem.”

As we know from examining the Mosquito, this same opinion isn’t restricted to Dr Reid. It was the Mosquito manufacturer Compound Security’s marketing director, Simon Morris, who apparently told the BBC that:

“People have a right to assemble with others in a peaceful way… We do not consider that this right includes the right of teenagers to congregate for no specific purpose.”

So there you have it. As Brendan O’Neill puts it in a New Statesman piece referenced in the Spiked article:

“…Fear and loathing… is driving policy on young people. We seem scared of our own youth, imagining that “hoodies” and “chavs” are dragging society down. We’re so scared, in fact, that we use impersonal methods to police them: we use scanners to monitor their behaviour, we blind them from a distance, and now employ machines to screech at them in the hope they will just go away. With no idea of what to say to them – how to inspire or socialise them – we seek to disperse, disperse, disperse. It will only heighten their sense of being outsiders.”

I was woken up (along with, I expect, lots of others) at about 5am today by a driver sounding his/her horn in the road outside – an arrogant two-second burst – then another replying (perhaps) with a slightly feeble one-second tone. I don’t know why; there are often a lot of horns during the day as there’s a level crossing which seems to generate a lot of frustration, but there are no trains passing through at 5am. Anyway, I went back to sleep and had various, fitful dreams, but not before thinking that’s where an architecture of control would be useful: a time-related horn interlock function, only allowing use of the horn during hours when it is legal. In the UK, that would be from 7am – 11.30 pm.

But then, waking up properly a couple of hours later, I remembered my earlier thought. And considered that this kind of control wouldn’t be necessary if people were more considerate towards others. If we could rely on people to care about the effects of their actions, there would be no need for quite a lot of the architectures of control discussed on this site, from speed humps to externally controlled speed limiters, and very little argument in favour of them.

As it is, my modified, awake, more alert opinion is that a society where people take responsibility for what they do is better than one where some external agency takes that responsibility away from them. Or, at least, I don’t want to live in that latter type of society, because I don’t want any control taken away from me, even if I have to put up with some idiots.

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, I know, I know, there may be an important backstory behind that person’s search. Some people apparently really do have problems with kids intimidating them (e.g. see these comments on the Mosquito) and believe that a technological solution is the only answer.

But take the concept in isolation: how will history judge the “device to stop young people congregating” concept? Will it be seen as a cruel, archaic display of embdedded prejudice, in the same way that we would be horrified to see “device to stop X race of people congregating” or “device to stop X colour people congregating”?

Or will it be seen as a mild, thin end of a much larger, more sinister wedge (“device to stop ALL people congregating”)?

This is the first book review I’ve done on this blog, though it won’t be the last. In a sense, this is less of a conventional review than an attempt to discuss some of the ideas in the book, and synthesise them with points that have been raised by the examination of architectures of control: what can we learn from the arguments outlined in the book?

Adam Greenfield‘s Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing looks at the possibilities, opportunities and issues posed by the embedding of networked computing power and information processing in the environment, from the clichéd ‘rooms that recognise you and adapt to your preferences’ to surveillance systems linking databases to track people’s behaviour with unprecedented precision. The book is presented as a series of 81 theses, each a chapter in itself and each addressing a specific proposition about ubiquitous computing and how it will be used.

There’s likely to be a substantial overlap between architectures of control and pervasive everyware (thanks, Andreas), and, as an expert in the field, it’s worth looking at how Greenfield sees the control aspects of everyware panning out.

Everyware as a discriminatory architecture enabler

“Everyware can be engaged inadvertently, unknowingly, or even unwillingly“

In Thesis 16, Greenfield introduces the possibilities of pervasive systems tracking and sensing our behaviour—and basing responses on that—without our being aware of it, or against our wishes. An example he gives is a toilet which tests its users’ “urine for the breakdown products of opiates and communicate[s] its findings to [their] doctor, insurers or law-enforcement personnel,” without the user’s express say-so.

It’s not hard to see that with this level of unknowingly/unwillingly active everyware in the environment, there could be a lot of ‘architectures of control’ consequences. For example, systems which constrain users’ behaviour based on some arbitrary profile: a vending machine may refuse to serve a high-fat snack to someone whose RFID pay-card identifies him/her as obese; or, more critically, only a censored version of the internet or a library catalogue may be available to someone whose profile identifies him/her as likely to be ‘unduly’ influenced by certain materials, according to some arbitrary definition. Yes, Richard Stallman’s Right To Read prophecy could well come to pass through individual profiling by networked ubiquitous computing power, in an even more sinister form than he anticipated.

Taking the ‘discriminatory architecture’ possibilities further, Thesis 30, concentrating on the post-9/11 ‘security’ culture, looks at how:

“Everyware redefines not merely computing but surveillance as well… beyond simple observation there is control… At the heart of all ambitions aimed at the curtailment of mobility is the demand that people be identifiable at all times—all else follows from that. In an everyware world, this process of identification is a much subtler and more powerful thing than we often consider it to be; when the rhythm of your footsteps or the characteristic pattern of your transactions can give you away, it’s clear that we’re talking about something deeper than ‘your papers, please.’

Once this piece of information is in hand, it’s possible to ask questions like Who is allowed here? and What is he or she allowed to do here?… consider the ease with which an individual’s networked currency cards, transit passes and keys can be traced or disabled, remotely—in fact, this already happens. But there’s a panoply of ubiquitous security measures both actual and potential that are subtler still: navigation systems that omit all paths through an area where a National Special Security Event is transpiring, for example… Elevators that won’t accept requests for floors you’re not accredited for; retail items, from liquor to ammunition to Sudafed, that won’t let you purchase them… Certain options simply do not appear as available to you, like greyed-out items on a desktop menu—in fact, you won’t even get that back-handed notification—you won’t even know the options ever existed.”

This kind of ‘creeping erosion of norms‘ is something that’s concerned me a lot on this blog, as it seems to be a feature of so many dystopian visions, both real and fictional. From the more trivial—Japanese kids growing up believing it’s perfectly normal to have to buy music again every time they change their phone—to society blindly walking into 1984 due to a “generational failure of memory about individual rights” (Simon Davies, LSE), it’s the “you won’t even know the [options|rights|abilities|technology|information|words to express dissent] ever existed” bit that scares me the most.

Going on, Greenfield quotes MIT’s Gary T Marx‘s definition of an “engineered society,” in which “the goal is to eliminate or limit violations by control of the physical and social environment.” I’d say that, broadening the scope to include product design, and the implication to include manipulation of people’s behaviour for commercial ends as well as political, that’s pretty much the architectures of control concept as I see it.

In Thesis 42, Greenfield looks at the chain of events that might lead to an apparently innocuous use of data in one situation (e.g. the recording of ethnicity on an ID card, purely for ‘statistical’ purposes) escalating into a major problem further down the line, when that same ID record has become the basis of an everyware system which controls, say, access to a building. Any criteria recorded can be used as a basis for access restriction, and if ‘enabled’ deliberately or accidentally, it would be quite possible for certain people to be denied services or access to a building, etc, purely on an arbitrary, discriminatory criterion.

“…the result is that now the world has been provisioned with a system capable of the worst sort of discriminatory exclusion, and doing it all cold-bloodedly, at the level of its architecture… the deep design of ubiquitous systems will shape the choices available to us in day-to-day life, in ways both subtle and less so… It’s easy to imagine being denied access to some accommodation, for example, because of some machine-rendered judgement as to our suitability, and… that judgement may well hinge on something we did far away in both space and time… All we’ll be able to guess is that we conformed to some profile, or violated the nominal contours of some other…

The downstream consequences of even the least significant-seeming architectural decision could turn out to be considerable—and unpleasant.”

Indeed.

Everyware as mass mind control enabler

In a—superficially—less contentious area, Thesis 34 includes the suggestion that everyware may allow more of us to relax: to enter the alpha-wave meditative state of “Tibetan monks in deep contemplation… it’s easy to imagine environmental interventions, from light to sound to airflow to scent, designed to evoke the state of mindfulness, coupled to a body-monitor setting that helps you recognise when you’ve entered it.” Creating this kind of device—whether biofeedback (closed loop) or open-loop—has interested designers for decades (indeed, my own rather primitive student project attempt a few years ago, MindCentre, featured light, sound and scent in an open-loop), but when coupled to the pervasive bio-monitoring of whole populations using everyware, some other possibilities surely present themselves.

Is it ridiculous to suggest that a population whose stress levels (and other biological indicators) are being constantly, automatically monitored, could equally well be calmed, ‘reassured’, subdued and controlled by everyware embedded in the environment designed for this purpose? One only has to look at the work of Hendricus Loos to see that the control technology exists, or is at least being developed (outside of the military); how long before it\’s networked to pervasive monitoring, even if, initially only of prisoners? See also this article by Francesca Cedor.\r\n\r\n\r\nEveryware as \’artefacts with politics\’\r\n\r\nOn a more general \’Do artefacts have politics?\’/\’Is design political?\’ point, Greenfield observes that certain technologies have “inherent potentials, gradients of connection” which predispose them to be deployed and used in particular ways (Thesis 27), i.e. technodeterminism. That sounds pretty vague, but it\’s — to some extent — applying Marshall McLuhan\’s “the medium is the message” concept to technology. Greenfield makes an interesting point:\r\n\r\n

“It wouldn\’t have taken a surplus of imagination, even ahead of the fact, to discern the original Napster in Paul Baran\’s first paper on packet-switched networks, the Manhattan skyline in the Otis safety elevator patent, or the suburb and the strip mall latent in the heart of the internal combustion engine.”

\r\n\r\nThat\’s an especially clear way of looking at \’intentions\’ in design: to what extent are the future uses of a piece of technology, and the way it will affect society, embedded in the design, capabilities and interaction architecture? And to what extent are the designers aware of the power they control? In Thesis 42, Greenfield says, “whether consciously or not, values are encoded into a technology, in preference to others that might have been, and then enacted whenever the technology is employed”.\r\n\r\nLawrence Lessig has made the point that the decentralised architecture of the internet — as originally, deliberately planned — is a major factor in its enormous diversity and rapid success; but what about in other fields? It\’s clear that Richard Stallman\’s development of the GPL (and Lessig\’s own Creative Commons licences) show a rigorous design intent to shape how they are applied and what can be done with the material they cover. But does it happen with other endeavours? Surely every RFID developer is aware of the possibilities of using the technology for tracking and control of people, even if he/she is \’only\’ working on tracking parcels? As Greenfield puts it, “RFID \’wants\’ to be everywhere and part of everything.” He goes on to note that the 128-bit nature of the forthcoming IPv6 addressing standard — giving 2^128 possible addresses — pretty clearly demonstrates an intention to “transform everything in the world, even every part of every thing, into a node.” \r\n\r\nNevertheless, in many cases, designed systems will be put to uses that the originators really did not intend. As Greenfield comments in Thesis 41:\r\n\r\n

“…connect… two discrete databases, design software that draws inferences fromt he appearance of certain patterns of fact—as our relational technology certainly allows us to do—and we have a situation where you can be identified by name and likely political sympathy as you walk through a space provisioned with the necessary sensors.\r\n\r\nDid anyone intend this? Of course not—at least, we can assume that the original designers of each separate system did not. But when… sensors and databases are networked and interoperable… it is a straightforward matter to combine them to produce effects unforeseen by their creators.”

\r\n\r\nIn Thesis 23, the related idea of \’embedded assumptions\’ in designed everyware products and systems is explored, with the example of a Japanese project to aid learning of the language, including alerting participants to “which of the many levels of politeness is appropriate in a given context,” based on the system knowing every participant\’s social status, and “assign[ing] a rank to every person in the room… this ordering is a function of a student\’s age, position, and affiliations.” Greenfield notes that, while this is entirely appropriate for the context in which the teaching system is used:\r\n\r\n

“It is nevertheless disconcerting to think how easily such discriminations can be hard-coded into something seemingly neutral and unimpeachable and to consider the force they have when uttered by such a source…\r\n\r\nEveryware [like almost all design, I would suggest (DL)]… will invariably reflect the assumptions its designers bring to it… those assumptions will result in orderings—and those orderings will be manifested pervasively, in everything from whose preferences take precedence while using a home-entertainment system to which of the injured supplicants clamouring for the attention of the ER staff gets cared for first.”

\r\n\r\nThesis 69 states that:\r\n\r\n

“It is ethically incumbent on the designers of ubiquitous systems and environments to afford the human user some protection”

\r\n\r\nand I think I very much agree with that. From my perspective as a designer I would want to see that ethos promoted in universities and design schools: that is real, active user-centred, thoughtful design rather than the vague, posturing rhetoric which so often surrounds and obscures the subject. Indeed, I would further broaden the edict to include affording the human user some control, as well as merely protection—in all design—but that\’s a subject for another day (I have quite a lot to say on this issue, as you might expect!). Greenfield touches on this in Thesis 76 where he states that “ubiquitous systems must not introduce undue complications into ordinary operations” but I feel the principle really needs to be stronger than that. Thesis 77 proposes that “ubiquitous systems must offer users the ability to opt out, always and at any point,” but I fear that will translate into reality as \’optional\’ in the same way that the UK\’s proposed ID cards will be optional: if you don\’t have one, you\’ll be denied access to pretty much everything. And you can bet you\’ll be watched like a hawk.\r\n\r\n\r\nEveryware: transparent or not?\r\n\r\nGreenfield returns a number of times to the question of whether everyware should be presented to us as \’seamless\’, with the relations between different systems not openly clear, or \’seamful\’, where we understand and are informed about how systems will interact and pass data before we become involved with them. From an \’architectures of control\’ point of view, the most relevant point here is mentioned in Theses 39 and 40:\r\n\r\n

“…the problem posed by the obscure interconnection of apparently discrete systems… the decision made to shield the user from the system\’s workings also conceals who is at risk and who stands to benefit in a given transaction…\r\n\r\n”MasterCard, for example, clearly hopes that people will lose track of what is signified by the tap of a PayPass card—that the action will become automatic and thus fade from perception.”

\r\n\r\nThis is a very important issue and also seems especially pertinent to much in \’trusted\’ computing where the user may well be entirely oblivious to what information is being collected about him or her, and to whom it is being transmitted, and, due to encryption, unable to access it even if the desire to investigate were there. Ross Anderson has explored this in great depth.\r\n\r\nThesis 74 proposes that “Ubiquitous systems must contain provisions for immediate and transparent querying of their ownership, use and capabilities,” which is a succinct principle I very much hope will be followed, though I have a lot of doubt.\r\n\r\n\r\nFightback devices\r\n\r\nIn Thesis 78, Greenfield mentions the Georgia Tech CCD-light-flooding system to prevent unauthorised photography as a fightback device challenging everyware, i.e. that it will allow people to stop themselves being photographed or filmed without their permission.\r\n\r\nI feel that interpretation is somewhat naïve. I very, very much doubt that offering the device as a privacy protector for the public is a) in any way a real intention from Georgia Tech\’s point of view, or b) that members of the public who did use such a device to evade being filmed and photographed would be tolerated for long. Already in the UK we have shopping centres where hooded tops are banned so that every shopper\’s face can clearly be recorded on CCTV; I hardly think I\’d be allowed to get away with shining a laser into the cameras! \r\n\r\nAlthough Greenfield notes that the Georgia Tech device does seem “to be oriented less toward the individual\’s right to privacy than towards the needs of institutions attempting to secure themselves against digital observation,” he uses examples of Honda testing a new car in secret (time for Hans Lehmann to dig out that old telephoto SLR!) and the Transportation Security Agency keeping details of airport security arrangements secret. The more recent press reports about the Georgia Tech device make pretty clear that the real intention (presumably the most lucrative) is to use it arbitrarily to stop members of the public photographing and filming things, rather than the other way round. If used at all, it\’ll be to stop people filming in cinemas, taking pictures of their kids with Santa at the mall (they\’ll have to buy an \’official\’ photo instead), taking photos at sports events (again, that official photo), taking photos of landmarks (you\’ll have to buy a postcard) and so on. \r\n\r\nIt\’s not a fightback device: it\’s a grotesque addition to the rent-seekers\’ armoury.\r\n\r\nRFID-destroyers (such as this highly impressive project), though, which Greenfield also mentions, certainly are fightback devices, and as he notes in Thesis 79, an arms race may well develop, which ultimately will only serve to enshrine the mindset of control further into the technology, with less chance for us to disentangle the ethics from the technical measures.\r\n\r\nConclusion\r\n\r\nOverall, this is a most impressive book which clearly leads the reader through the implications of ubiquitous computing, and the issues surrounding its development and deployment in a very logical style (the \’series of theses\’ method helps in this: each point is carefully developed from the last and there\’s very little need to flick between different sections to cross-reference ideas). The book\’s structure has been designed, which is pleasing. Everyware has provided a lot of food for thought from my point of view, and I\’d recommend it to anyone with an interest in technology and the future of our society. Everyware, in some form, is inevitable, and it\’s essential that designers, technologists and policy-makers educate themselves right now about the issues. Greenfield\’s book is an excellent primer on the subject which ought to be on every designer\’s bookshelf.\r\n\r\nFinally, I thought it was appropriate to dig up that Gilles Deleuze quote again, since this really does seem a prescient description for the possibility of a more \’negative\’ form of everyware:\r\n\r\n

“The progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination.”

‘