Design with Intent | Democracy of innovation

frog design on Design with Intent

By Dan Lockton ⋅ June 14, 2009 ⋅ 13 comments

Robert Fabricant of frog design – with whom I had a great discussion a couple of weeks ago in London – has an insightful new article up at frog’s Design Mind, titled, oddly enough, ‘Design with Intent: how designers can influence behaviour’ – which tackles the question of how, and whether, designers can and should [...]

The Hacker’s Amendment

By Dan Lockton ⋅ February 17, 2009 ⋅ 3 comments

Congress shall pass no law limiting the rights of persons to manipulate, operate, or otherwise utilize as they see fit any of their possessions or effects, nor the sale or trade of tools to be used for such purposes.
From Artraze commenting on this Slashdot story about the levels of DRM in Windows 7.
I think it [...]

Stuff that matters: Unpicking the pyramid

By Dan Lockton ⋅ January 14, 2009 ⋅ 5 comments

Most things are unnecessary. Most products, most consumption, most politics, most writing, most research, most jobs, most beliefs even, just aren’t useful, for some scope of ‘useful’.
I’m sure I’m not the first person to point this out, but most of our civilisation seems to rely on the idea that “someone else will sort it out”, [...]

Another charging opportunity?

By Dan Lockton ⋅ July 23, 2007 ⋅ 13 comments

Last month, an Apple patent application was published describing a method of “Protecting electronic devices from extended unauthorized use” – effectively a ‘charging rights management’ system.
New Scientist and OhGizmo have stories explaining the system; while the stated intention is to make stolen devices less useful/valuable (by preventing a thief charging them with unauthorised chargers), [...]

Smile, you’re on Countermanded Camera

By Dan Lockton ⋅ July 9, 2007 ⋅ 13 comments

Image from Miquel Mora’s website
We’ve looked before at a number of technologies and products aimed at ‘preventing’ photography and image recording in some way, from censoring photographs of ‘copyrighted content’ and banknotes, to Georgia Tech’s CCD-flooding system.
Usually these systems are about locking out the public, or removing freedoms in some way (a lot of [...]

Sniffing out censorship

By Dan Lockton ⋅ November 1, 2006 ⋅ 2 comments

Image from News Sniffer
News Sniffer’s Revisionista monitors alterations to published news stories from a variety of sources by comparing RSS feeds, sometimes revealing subsequently redacted information or changes of opinion (e.g. note the removed phrase in the first paragraph of this story about Cuba). While many of the changes are simply re-wordings for clarity or [...]

The secret

By Dan Lockton ⋅ October 31, 2006 ⋅ 6 comments

“The secret to getting ahead in the 21st century is capitalizing on people doing what they want to do, rather than trying to get them to do what you want to do.”
(Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com, in a Wired article quoted at the Public Journalism network)
I think this applies very much to issues of control in [...]

‘Design Must Relinquish Control’

By Dan Lockton ⋅ October 17, 2006 ⋅ 3 comments

Niblettes tackles the issue of designers and control, specifically, how much the user’s experience and methods of using a product or service should be defined by the designer. The conclusion – paralleling a theme in a marketing speech by Procter & Gamble’s Alan G Lafley – is that designers must start to think in terms [...]

Shaping behaviour at the Design Council

By Dan Lockton ⋅ September 28, 2006 ⋅ 3 comments

Photo by Kate Andrews
I’ve blogged before mentioning the work of the UK Design Council’s RED research arm, which applies ‘design thinking’ to redevelop and create public services appropriate for societal changes right now and in the years to come. The previous post was specifically about Jennie Winhall’s ‘Is design political?’ essay, but I’ve kept in [...]

Transcranial magnetic stimulation

By Dan Lockton ⋅ September 7, 2006 ⋅ 7 comments

An image from Hendricus Loos’s 2001 US patent, ‘Remote Magnetic Manipulation of Nervous Systems’
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”, [...]

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