Q12 Do you agree with the Government’s position that a standalone display should be provided with a smart meter?

Free-standing displays (presumably wirelessly connected to the meter itself, as proposed in [7, p.16]) could be an effective way of bringing the meter ‘out of the cupboard‘, making an information flow visible which was previously hidden. As Donella Meadows put it when comparing electricity meter placements [1, pp. 14-15] this provides a new feedback loop, “delivering information to a place where it wasn’t going before” and thus allowing consumers to modify their behaviour in response.

“An accessible display device connected to the meter” [2, p.8] or “series of modules connected to a meter” [3, p. 28] would be preferable to something where an extra step has to be taken for a consumer to access the data, such as only having a TV or internet interface for the information, but as noted [3, p.31] “flexibility for information to be provided through other formats (for example through the internet, TV) in addition to the provision of a display” via an open API, publicly documented, would be the ideal situation. Interesting ‘energy dashboard’ TV interfaces have been trialled in projects such as live|work’s Low Carb Lane [6], and offer the potential for interactivity and extra information display supported by the digital television platform, but it would be a mistake to rely on this solely (even if simply because it will necessarily interfere with the primary reason that people have a television).

The question suggests that a single display unit would be provided with each meter, presumably with the householder free to position it wherever he or she likes (perhaps a unit with interchangeable provision for a support stand, a magnet to allow positioning on a refrigerator, a sucker for use on a window and hook to allow hanging up on the wall would be ideal – the location of the display could be important, as noted [4, p. 49]) but the ability to connect multiple display units would certainly afford more possibilities for consumer engagement with the information displayed as well as reducing the likelihood of a display unit being mislaid. For example, in shared accommodation where there are multiple residents all of whom are expected to contribute to a communal electricity bill, each person being aware of others’ energy use (as in, for example, the Watt Watchers project [5]) could have an important social proof effect among peers.

Open APIs and data standards would permit ranges of aftermarket energy displays to be produced, ranging from simple readouts (or even pager-style alerters) to devices and kits which could allow consumers to perform more complex analysis of their data (along the lines of the user-led innovative uses of the Current Cost, for example [8]) – another route to having multiple displays per household.

Q13 Do you have any comments on what sort of data should be provided to consumers as a minimum to help them best act to save energy (e.g. information on energy use, money, CO2 etc)?

Low targets?
This really is the central question of the whole project, since the fundamental assumption throughout is that provision of this information will “empower consumers” and thereby “change our energy habits” [3, p.13]. It is assumed that feedback, including real-time feedback, on electricity usage will lead to behaviour change: “Smart metering will provide consumers with tools with which to manage their energy consumption, enabling them to take greater personal responsibility for the environmental impacts of their own behaviour” [4, p.46]; “Access to the consumption data in real time provided by smart meters will provide consumers with the information they need to take informed action to save energy and carbon” [3, p.31].

Nevertheless, with “the predicted energy saving to consumers… as low as 2.8%” [4, p.18], the actual effects of the information on consumer behaviour are clearly not considered likely to be especially significant (this figure is more conservative than the 5-15% range identified by Sarah Darby [9]). It would, of course, be interesting to know whether certain types of data or feedback, if provided in the context of a well-designed interface could improve on this rather low figure: given the scale of the proposed roll-out of these meters (every household in the country) and the cost commitment involved, it would seem incredibly short-sighted not to take this opportunity to design and test better feedback displays which can, perhaps, improve significantly on the 2.8% figure.

(Part of the problem with a suggested figure as low as 2.8% is that it makes it much more difficult to defend the claim that the meters will offer consumers “important benefits” [3, p.27]. The benefits to electricity suppliers are clearer, but ‘selling’ the idea of smart meters to the public is, I would suggest, going to be difficult when the supposed benefits are so meagre.)

If we consider the use context of the smart meter from a consumer’s point of view, it should allow us to identify better which aspects are most important. What is a consumer going to do with the information received? How does the feedback loop actually occur in practice? How would this differ with different kinds of information?

Levels of display
Even aside from the actual ‘units’ debate (money / energy / CO2), there are many possible types and combinations of information that the display could show consumers, but for the purposes of this discussion, I’ll divide them into three levels:

(1) Simple feedback on current (& cumulative) energy use / cost (self-monitoring)
(2) Social / normative feedback on others’ energy use and costs (social proof + self-monitoring)
(3) Feedforward, giving information about the future impacts of behavioural decisions (simulation & feedforward + kairos + self-monitoring)

These are by no means mutually exclusive and I’d assume that any system providing (3) would also include (1), for example.

Nevertheless, it is likely that (1) would be the cheapest, lowest-common-denominator system to roll out to millions of homes, without (2) or (3) included – so if thought isn’t given to these other levels, it may be that (1) is all consumers get.

I’ve done mock-ups of the sort of thing each level might display (of course these are just ideas, and I’m aware that a) I’m not especially skilled in interface design, despite being very interested in it; and b) there’s no real research behind these) in order to have something to visualise / refer to when discussing them.

(1) Simple feedback on current (& cumulative) energy use and cost

I’ve tried to express some of the concerns I have over a very simple, cheap implementation of (1) in a scenario, which I’m not claiming to be representative of what will actually happen – but the narrative is intended to address some of the ways this kind of display might be useful (or not) in practice:

Jenny has just had a ‘smart meter’ installed by someone working on behalf of her electricity supplier. It comes with a little display unit that looks a bit like a digital alarm clock. There’s a button to change the display mode to ‘cumulative’ or ‘historic’ but at present it’s set on ‘realtime’: that’s the default setting.

Jenny attaches it to her kitchen fridge with the magnet on the back. It’s 4pm and it’s showing a fairly steady value of 0.5 kW, 6 pence per hour. She opens the fridge to check how much milk is left, and when she closes the door again Jenny notices the figure’s gone up to 0.7 kW but drops again soon after the door’s closed, first to 0.6 kW but then back down to 0.5 kW again after a few minutes. Then her two teenage children, Kim and Laurie arrive home from school – they switch on the TV in the living room and the meter reading shoots up to 0.8 kW, then 1.1 kW suddenly. What’s happened? Jenny’s not sure why it’s changed so much. She walks into the living room and Kim tells her that Laurie’s gone upstairs to play on his computer. So it must be the computer, monitor, etc.

Two hours later, while the family’s sitting down eating dinner (with the TV on in the background), Jenny glances across at the display and sees that it’s still reading 1.1 kW, 13 pence per hour.

“Is your PC still switched on, Laurie?” she asks.
“Yeah, Mum,” he replies
“You should switch it off when you’re not using it; it’s costing us money.”
“But it needs to be on, it’s downloading stuff.”

Jenny’s not quite sure how to respond. She can’t argue with Laurie: he knows a lot more than her about computers. The phone rings and Kim puts the TV on standby to reduce the noise while talking. Jenny notices the display reading has gone down slightly to 1.0 kW, 12 pence per hour. She walks over and switches the TV off fully, and sees the reading go down to 0.8 kW.

Later, as it gets dark and lights are switched on all over the house, along with the TV being switched on again, and Kim using a hairdryer after washing her hair, with her stereo on in the background and Laurie back at his computer, Jenny notices (as she loads the tumble dryer) that the display has shot up to 6.5 kW, 78 pence per hour. When the tumble dryer’s switched on, that goes up even further to 8.5 kW, £1.02 per hour. The sight of the £ sign shocks her slightly – can they really be using that much electricity? It seems like the kids are costing her even more than she thought!

But what can she really do about it? She switches off the TV and sees the display go down to 8.2 kW, 98 pence per hour, but the difference seems so slight that she switches it on again – it seems worth 4 pence per hour. She decides to have a cup of tea and boils the kettle that she filled earlier in the day. The display shoots up to 10.5 kW, £1.26 pence per hour. Jenny glances at the display with a pained expression, and settles down to watch TV with her tea. She needs a rest: paying attention to the display has stressed her out quite a lot, and she doesn’t seem to have been able to do anything obvious to save money.

Six months later, although Jenny’s replaced some light bulbs with compact fluorescents that were being given away at the supermarket, and Laurie’s new laptop has replaced the desktop PC, a new plasma TV has more than cancelled out the reductions. The display is still there on the fridge door, but when the batteries powering the display run out, and it goes blank, no-one notices.

The main point I’m trying to get across there is that with a very simple display, the possible feedback loop is very weak. It relies on the consumer experimenting with switching items on and off and seeing the effect it has on the readings, which – while it will initially have a certain degree of investigatory, exploratory interest – may well quickly pall when everyday life gets in the way. Now, without the kind of evidence that’s likely to come out of research programmes such as the CHARM project [10], it’s not possible to say whether levels (2) or (3) would fare any better, but giving a display the ability to provide more detailed levels of information – particularly if it can be updated remotely – massively increases the potential for effective use of the display to help consumers decide what to do, or even to think about what they’re doing in the first place, over the longer term.

(2) Social / normative feedback on others’ energy use and costs

A level (2) display would (in a much less cluttered form than what I’ve drawn above!) combine information about ‘what we’re doing’ (self-monitoring) with a reference, a norm – what other people are doing (social proof), either people in the same neighbourhood (to facilitate community discussion), or a more representative comparison such as ‘other families like us’, e.g. people with the same number of children of roughly the same age, living in similar size houses. There are studies going back to the 1970s (e.g. [11, 12]) showing dramatic (2 × or 3 ×) differences in the amount of energy used by similar families living in identical homes, suggesting that the behavioural component of energy use can be significant. A display allowing this kind of comparison could help make consumers aware of their own standing in this context.

However, as Wesley Schultz et al [13] showed in California, this kind of feedback can lead to a ‘boomerang effect’, where people who are told they’re doing better than average then start to care less about their energy use, leading to it increasing back up to the norm. It’s important, then, that any display using this kind of feedback treats a norm as a goal to achieve only on the way down. Schultz et al went on to show that by using a smiley face to demonstrate social approval of what people had done – affective engagement – the boomerang effect can be mitigated.

(3) Feedforward, giving information about the future impacts of behavioural decisions

A level (3) display would give consumers feedforward [14] – effectively, simulation of what the impact of their behaviour would be (switching on this device now rather than at a time when there’s a lower tariff – Economy 7 or a successor), and tips about how to use things more efficiently at the right moment (kairos), and in the right kind of environment, for them to be useful. Whereas ‘Tips of the Day’ in software frequently annoy users [15] because they get in the way of a user’s immediate task, with something relatively passive such as a smart meter display, this could be a more useful application for them. The networked capability of the smart meter means that the display could be updated frequently with new sets of tips, perhaps based on seasonal or weather conditions (“It’s going to be especially cold tonight – make sure you close all the curtains before you go to bed, and save 20p on heating”) or even special tariff changes for particular periods of high demand (“Everyone’s going to be putting the kettle on during the next ad break in [major event on TV]. If you’re making tea, do it now instead of in 10 minutes; time, and get a 50p discount on your next bill”).

Disaggregated data: identifying devices
This level (3) display doesn’t require any ability to know what devices a consumer has, or to be able to disaggregate electricity use by device. It can make general suggestions that, if not relevant, a consumer can ignore.

But what about actually disaggregating the data for particular devices? Surely this must be an aim for a really ’smart’ meter display. Since [4, p.52] notes – in the context of discussing privacy – that “information from smart meters could… make it possible…to determine…to a degree, the types of technology that were being used in a property,” this information should clearly be offered to consumers themselves, if the electricity suppliers are going to do the analysis (I’ve done a bit of a possible mockup, using a more analogue dashboard style).

Whether the data are processed in the meter itself, or upstream at the supplier and then sent back down to individual displays, and whether the devices are identified from some kind of signature in their energy use patterns, or individual tags or extra plugs of some kind, are interesting technology questions, but from a consumer’s point of view (so long as privacy is respected), the mechanism perhaps doesn’t matter so much. Having the ability to see what device is using what amount of electricity, from a single display, would be very useful indeed. It removes the guesswork element.

Now, Sentec’s Coracle technology [16] is presumably ready for mainstream use, with an agreement signed with Onzo [17], and ISE’s signal-processing algorithms can identify devices down to the level of makes and models [18], so it’s quite likely that this kind of technology will be available for smart meters for consumers fairly soon. But the question is whether it will be something that all customers get – i.e. as a recommendation of the outcome of the DECC consultation – or an expensive ‘upgrade’. The fact that the consultation doesn’t mention disaggregation very much worries me slightly.

If disaggregated data by device were to be available for the mass-distributed displays, clearly this would significantly affect the interface design used: combining this with, say a level (2) type social proof display could – even if via a website rather than on the display itself – let a consumer compare how efficient particular models of electrical goods are in use, by using the information from other customers of the supplier.

In summary, for Q13 – and I’m aware I haven’t addressed the “energy use, money, CO2 etc” aspect directly – there are people much better qualified to do that – I feel that the more ability any display has to provide information of different kinds to consumers, the more opportunities there will be to do interesting and useful things with that information (and the data format and API must be open enough to allow this). In the absence of more definitive information about what kind of feedback has the most behaviour-influencing effect on what kind of consumer, in what context, and so on, it’s important that the display be as adaptable as possible.

Q14 Do you have comments regarding the accessibility of meters/display units for particular consumers (e.g. vulnerable consumers such as the disabled, partially sighted/blind)?

The inclusive design aspects of the meters and displays could be addressed through an exclusion audit, applying something such as the University of Cambridge’s Exclusion Calculator [19] to any proposed designs. Many solutions which would benefit particular consumers with special needs would also potentially be useful for the population as a whole – e.g. a buzzer or alarm signalling that a device has been left on overnight which isn’t normally, or (with disaggregation capability) notifying the consumer that, say, the fridge has been left open, would be pretty useful for everyone, not just the visually impaired or people with poor memory.

It seems clear that having open data formats and interfaces for any device will allow a wider range of things to be done with the data, many of which could be very useful for vulnerable users. Still, fundamental physical design questions about the device – how long the batteries last for, how easy they are to replace for someone with poor eyesight or arthritis, how heavy the unit is, whether it will break if dropped from hand height – will all have an impact on its overall accessibility (and usefulness).

Thinking of ‘particular consumers’ more generally, as the question asks, suggests a few other issues which need to be addressed:

- A website-only version of the display data (as suggested at points in the consultation document) would exclude a lot of consumers who are without internet access, without computer understanding, with only dial-up (metered) internet, or simply not motivated or interested enough to check – i.e., it would be significantly exclusionary.

- Time-of-Use (ToU) pricing will rely heavily on consumers actually understanding it, and what the implications are, and changing their behaviour in accordance. Simply charging consumers more automatically, without them having good enough feedback to understand what’s going on, only benefits electricity suppliers. If demand- or ToU-related pricing is introduced – “the potential for customer confusion… as a result of the greater range of energy tariffs and energy related information” [4, p. 49] is going to be significant. The design of the interface, and how the pricing structure works, is going to be extremely important here, and even so may still exclude a great many consumers who do not or cannot understand the structure.

- The ability to disable supply remotely [4, p. 12, p.20] will no doubt provoke significant reaction from consumers, quite apart from the terrible impact it will have on the most vulnerable consumers (the elderly, the very poor, and people for whom a reliable electricity supply is essential for medical reasons), regardless of whether they are at fault (i.e. non-payment) or not. There WILL inevitably be errors: there is no reason to suppose that they will not occur. Imagine the newspaper headlines when an elderly person dies from hypothermia. Disconnection may only occur in “certain well-defined circumstances” [3, p. 28] but these will need to be made very explicit.

- “Smart metering potentially offers scope for remote intervention… [which] could involve direct supplier or distribution company interface with equipment, such as refrigerators, within a property, overriding the control of the householder” [4, p. 52] – this simply offers further fuel for consumer distrust of the meter programme (rightly so, to be honest). As Darby [9] notes, “the prospect of ceding control over consumption does not appeal to all customers”. Again, this remote intervention, however well-regulated it might be supposed to be if actually implemented, will not be free from error. “Creating consumer confidence and awareness will be a key element of successfully delivering smart meters” [4, p.50] does not sit well with the realities of installing this kind of channel for remote disconnection or manipulation in consumers’ homes, and attempting to bury these issues by presenting the whole thing as entirely beneficial for consumers will be seen through by intelligent people very quickly indeed.

- Many consumers will simply not trust such new meters with any extra remote disconnection ability – it completely removes the human, the compassion, the potential to reason with a real person. Especially if the predicted energy saving to consumers is as low as 2.8% [4, p.18], many consumers will (perhaps rightly) conclude that the smart meter is being installed primarily for the benefit of the electricity company, and simply refuse to allow the contractors into their homes. Whether this will lead to a niche for a supplier which does not mandate installation of a meter – and whether this would be legal – are interesting questions.

Dan Lockton, Researcher, Design for Sustainable Behaviour
Cleaner Electronics Research Group, Brunel Design, Brunel University, London, June 2009

[1] Meadows, D. Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System. Sustainability Institute, 1999.

[2] DECC. Impact Assessment of smart / advanced meters roll out to small and medium businesses, May 2009.

[3] DECC. A Consultation on Smart Metering for Electricity and Gas, May 2009.

[4] DECC. Impact Assessment of a GB-wide smart meter roll out for the domestic sector, May 2009.

[5] Fischer, J. and Kestner, J. ‘Watt Watchers’, 2008.

[6] DOTT / live|work studio. ‘Low Carb Lane’, 2007.

[7] BERR. Impact Assessment of Smart Metering Roll Out for Domestic Consumers and for Small Businesses, April 2008.

[8] O’Leary, N. and Reynolds, R. ‘Current Cost: Observations and Thoughts from Interested Hackers’. Presentation at OpenTech 2008, London. July 2008.

[9] Darby S. The effectiveness of feedback on energy consumption. A review for DEFRA of the literature on metering, billing and direct displays. Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford. April 2006.

[10] Kingston University, CHARM Project. 2009

[11] Socolow, R.H. Saving Energy in the Home: Princeton’s Experiments at Twin Rivers. Ballinger Publishing, Cambridge MA, 1978

[12] Winett, R.A., Neale, M.S., Williams, K.R., Yokley, J. and Kauder, H., 1979 ‘The effects of individual and group feedback on residential electricity consumption: three replications’. Journal of Environmental Systems, 8, p. 217-233.

[13] Schultz, P.W., Nolan, J.M., Cialdini, R.B., Goldstein, N.J. and Griskevicius, V., 2007.
‘The Constructive, Destructive and Reconstructive Power of Social Norms’. Psychological Science, 18 (5), p. 429-434.

[14] Djajadiningrat, T., Overbeeke, K. and Wensveen, S., 2002. ‘But how, Donald, tell us how?: on the creation of meaning in interaction design through feedforward and inherent feedback’. Proceedings of the 4th conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques. ACM Press, New York, p. 285-291.

[15] Business of Software discussion community (part of ‘Joel on Software’), ‘”Tip of the Day” on startup, value to the customer’, August 2006

[16] Sentec. ‘Coracle: a new level of information on energy consumption’, undated.

[17] Sentec. ‘Sentec and Onzo agree UK deal for home energy displays’, 28th April 2008

[18] ISE Intelligent Sustainable Energy, ‘Technology’, undated

[19] Engineering Design Centre, University of Cambridge. Inclusive Design Toolkit: Exclusion Calculator, 2007-8

In a lot of the debate and discussion about energy, future electricity generation and metering, improved efficiency and influencing consumer behaviour – at least from an engineering perspective – the term “demand” is used, in conjunction with “supply”, to represent the energy required to be supplied to consumers, much as in conventional “supply and demand” economics.

Now, I’m sure others have investigated this and characterised it economically much better than I can, but it seems to me that demand for energy (and sometimes water) is significantly different to, say, demand for most consumer products in that, for the most part, consumers only “demand” it indirectly. It is the products and systems around us which draw the current: they are important actors and have the agency, in a sense (at least unless we really understand the impacts of how they operate).

While with, say, a car’s fuel consumption, we experience the car’s demand for fuel, and pay for it, directly in proportion to our demand for travel, with most household electricity use, we not only generally wait a month or more before having to confront the “demand” (via the bill), but separating the background demand (such as a refrigerator’s continuous energy use simply to operate) from conscious demand (such as our decision to use a fan heater all day) is very difficult for us to do as consumers: from a very simple consumer perspective (ignoring things like reactive power flow), electricity is interchangeable, and the feedback we get on our behaviour is only very weakly linked to the specifics of that behaviour.

Basically, then, a lot of “demand” is not conscious demand at all. Most consumers don’t make an in-the-moment decision to use more electricity if it gets cheaper (though it may happen over time, e.g. if someone decides to get electric heating because oil heating has become more expensive) or vice versa. The demand is a function of the products and systems around us, our habits, lifestyle and behaviours but it is very difficult for us to see this, and make decisions which have an impact on this. If there are major changes, such as a massively changed price, then real conscious demand changes may happen (so a kind of stepped curve rather than anything smooth) but this is surely not what happens in everyday life. At least at present.

Maybe, then, part of what design could offer here is to help translate this unconscious, product-led, delayed payment demand into a visible, tangible, immediate demand which makes us consider it like any other everyday buying / consumption choice. Real-time self-monitoring feedback from clever metering technology (e.g. Onzo or Wattson) could go a long way here, but what about feedforward? Can we go as far as on-off switches with price labels on them? (Digital, updated, real-time, of course.) Would it make us more price-sensitive to energy costs? Would that influence our behaviour?

One view of influencing user behaviour – what I’ve called the ‘errorproofing lens’ – treats a user’s interaction with a system as a set of defined target behaviour routes which the designer wants the user to follow, with deviations from those routes being treated as ‘errors’. Design can help avoid the errors, either by making it easier for users to work without making errors, or by making the errors impossible in the first place (a defensive design approach).

That’s fairly obvious, and it’s a key part of interaction design, usability and human factors practice, much of its influence in the design profession coming from Don Norman’s seminal Design of Everyday Things. It’s often the view on influencing user behaviour found in health & safety-related design, medical device design and manufacturing engineering (as poka-yoke): where, as far as possible, one really doesn’t want errors to occur at all (Shingo’s zero defects). Learning through trial-and-error exploration of the interface might be great for, say, Kai’s Power Tools, but a bad idea for a dialysis machine or the control room of a nuclear power station.

It’s worth noting a (the?) key difference between an errorproofing approach and some other views of influencing user behaviour, such as Persuasive Technology: persuasion implies attitude change leading to the target behaviour, while errorproofing doesn’t care whether or not the user’s attitude changes, as long as the target behaviour is met. Attitude change might be an effect of the errorproofing, but it doesn’t have to be. If I find I can’t start a milling machine until the guard is in place, the target behaviour (I put the guard in place before pressing the switch) is achieved regardless of whether my attitude to safety changes. It might do, though: the act of realising that the guard needs to be in place, and why, may well cause safety to be on my mind consciously. Then again, it might do the opposite: e.g. the steering wheel spike argument. The distinction between whether the behaviour change is mindful or not is something I tried to capture with the behaviour change barometer.

Making it easier for users to avoid errors – whether through warnings, choice of defaults, confirmation dialogues and so on – is slightly ’softer’ than actual forcing the user to conform, and does perhaps offer the chance to relay some information about the reasoning behind the measure. But the philosophy behind all of these is, inevitably “we know what’s best”: a dose of paternalism, the degree of constraint determining the ‘libertarian’ prefix. The fact that all of us can probably think of everyday examples where we constantly have to change a setting from its default, or a confirmation dialogue slows us down (process friction), suggests that simple errorproofing cannot stand in for an intelligent process of understanding the user.

On with the patterns, then: there’s nothing new here, but hopefully seeing the patterns side by side allows an interesting and useful comparison. Defaults and Interlock are the two best ‘inspirations’ I think, in terms of using these errorproofing patterns to innovate concepts for influencing user behaviour in other fields. There will be a lot more to say about each pattern (further classification, and what kinds of behaviour change each is especially applicable to) in the near future as I gradually progress with this project.

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Photos/screenshots by Dan Lockton except seatbelt warning image (composite of photos by Zoom Zoom and Reiver) and donor card photo by Adrienne Hart-Davis.

Tang Tang, Loughborough University
Creating Sustainable Behaviour: An exploration of environmental impacts of household cold appliance use

Products, as the interface between consumers and consumption activities, can give immediate and direct responses to users’ operations: how they are perceived, learned, and used. Designing a product means designing a user experience with the product, which also determines the compound impacts of this experience. A better understanding of what users do and how they interact, with products as well as the hidden factors behind the daily decision-making process should be gained in order to develop a valid critique of environmentally significant consumption. This study aims to show that in-depth user research is an essential starting point for improving product design for behavioural change to reduce environment impacts. A single product type, household cold appliances, was chosen as a case to explore the capacity of designer-conducted user study to identify unsustainable aspects of product use.

Ed Elias, University of Bath
Behaviour Driven Design
Energy using products account for a growing proportion of domestic energy use and it is important to make these products as efficient as possible. However even the most efficient product will waste energy if it is used badly. User behaviour can be a significant proportion of a product’s energy demand. This presentation will give an overview of the work being done to develop a Behaviour Driven Design Methodology for improving the energy efficiency of products during use, by studying user behaviours and designing the products to them.

Dan Lockton, Brunel University
Design for Sustainable Behaviour: Easier Efficiency by Influencing Interaction
The idea of using design strategically to influence users’ behaviour -Design with Intent – recurs across many fields, in diverse contexts, and a set of patterns can be identified, linking target behaviours to particular design techniques, physical, psychological and technical. Applying these techniques to environmental problems where user behaviour is a significant factor offers the prospect of Design for Sustainable Behaviour – helping people use everyday products and systems more efficiently.

Dr Debra Lilley, Loughborough University
Exploring the ethics of design for behavioural change
Informative, persuasive or coercive products can be designed explicitly to change people’s attitudes and behaviours and encourage more sustainable actions. Informative or persuasive products seek to achieve a voluntary change in behaviour; a coercive technology, on the other hand, force behavioural change. Coercive approaches, though arguably more effective than an informative or persuasive ones, raise challenging ethical questions for designers; is it better to educate the consumer and risk failure or overrule users and “force” behavioural changes in order to achieve demonstrable results? Is it possible to “prescribe” actions with absolute certainty that the user will respond in the manner intended? Designers are trained to envision possibilities. But to what degree can designers foresee unintended effects which may result from the use of the products they design? How can designers anticipate and “design around” appropriation and adaptation on the part of the user?

13th Sustainable Design Network Seminar – “Design | Behaviour: Making it Happen!”
engCETL, Keith Green Building, Loughborough University
Friday 17th October 2008, 10.00am – 4.30pm

If you’re interested in design and behaviour change, particularly as applied to ecodesign and sustainable behaviour, this will be a really important event and ought to be well worth attending; I’m very much looking forward to being a part of it.

Debra Lilley, who runs the very useful Design-Behaviour website, sends details of an interesting forthcoming seminar at Loughborough University:

Design | Behaviour: Making it Happen!

The 13th Sustainable Design Network Seminar Design | Behaviour: Making it Happen! will be held on the 17th October 2008 at the Engineering Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (engCETL), Loughborough University. This special one-day event – featuring presentations, design activities and discussion – will explore methodologies for designing behavioural change and the ethical implications of designing products to encourage more sustainable use. Cost £60 (£20 concession) including lunch and refreshments. To find out more and book a place at this event please visit: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/susdesign/SDN/seminars/meetings.htm

I’ll be doing a presentation in the morning – here’s the abstract, and I’ll try and put a version online too afterwards:

Design for Sustainable Behaviour: Easier Efficiency by Influencing Interaction

Dan Lockton, School of Engineering & Design, Brunel University

The idea of using design strategically to influence users’ behaviour – Design with Intent – recurs across many fields, in diverse contexts, and a set of patterns can be identified, linking target behaviours to particular design techniques, physical, psychological and technical. Applying these techniques to environmental problems where user behaviour is a significant factor offers the prospect of Design for Sustainable Behaviour – helping people use everyday products and systems more efficiently.

The agenda isn’t online yet, but I’m guessing there’ll be some really insightful talks from people working on the intersection of design, sustainability and user behaviour – along with Debra, Loughborough’s Tracy Bhamra, Vicky Lofthouse and Tang Tang have all done some great work in this field. If you’re in the UK and interested in this sort of stuff, this seminar sounds very worthwhile.

Our DVD player has (to me) the most irritating standby light that I have ever seen on any device. When on, the light is constantly illuminated, but when in standby the light flashes continuously (at a slow rate). This drives me mad, but results in an interesting action – it causes me to turn it off at the plug when I am not using it (which is most of the time). Suddenly one little flashing light has resulted in more energy saving than having no light.

As he notes, designing a system with an indicator which actually draws power to inform you of… ‘nothing’ … actually may not be as inefficient as a from-first-principles efficiency design process would suggest, because of that human reaction. Similarly to the Static! project’s Power-Aware Cord, you may need to use a little extra energy to make people realise how much they’re using without thinking. Although:

There is one problem with this, it only works on people who care. If I did not care about saving energy, then I would just leave the laptop plugged in and the DVD player on. That means that you have to consider how your users will handle this kind of subtle feedback and determine whether turning the light off, or encouraging unplugging, results in more energy savings.

Sometimes the most obvious design decisions may not be the ones which result in the greatest energy saving.

This is a very astute observation indeed.

Are there any other examples where this sort of effect can be usefully employed? How similar is this to the ‘useful landmine’ concept where you deliberately force/provoke/annoy yourself into taking actions you otherwise wouldn’t bother/would forget to do?

EDIT: I’ve now added the audio! Thanks everyone for the suggestions on how best to do it; the audio is hosted on this site rather than the Internet Archive as the buffering seemed to stall a bit too much. Let me know if you have any problems.

I’ve put my presentation from Persuasive 2008 on SlideShare, – because of the visual style it really needs to be listened to, or viewed alongside the text (below, or in the comments when viewing it on the SlideShare site). Alternatively, just download it [PPT, 11.6 Mb] – it comes with the notes.

P.S. The slide about defaults, with the alarm clock stuck on 12:00, is meant to show it flashing – the actual PPT file uses an animated GIF – but SlideShare’s conversion process seems to have lost this element.*

1. I’m Dan Lockton, from Brunel University in London, and I’m going to be talking about what we call ‘Design with Intent’. It’s effectively Persuasive Technology in a Wider Context.

2. Persuasive Technology is an example of design that’s intended to result in certain user behaviour.
It’s design with intent.

3. If we cast our net a bit more widely, we can see that this idea recurs across many areas of design: solutions employed in one context are often applicable to others. Our research involves developing a tool to help designers match applicable design techniques to a range of ‘target behaviours’, and we’re ultimately going to be applying this to ecodesign, guiding more sustainable product use.

4. In this presentation we’ll look at a series of Design with Intent examples across different fields not normally considered part of Persuasive Technology, then see how the ideas of PT and DwI fit together. Then I’ll quickly describe how our work’s progressed since the paper was written.

5. Before getting started, have a look at these so-called ‘anti-loitering’ benches in Oxford, England – designed to prevent users actually sitting down, as the council freely admits. The seats are too high to sit properly and curved so you slide off if you try – you can ‘perch’, but that’s it. But there’s a worthwhile lesson right here: whatever the designers’ intent might be…

6. …people will find their own ways of using things. It’s easier to bend metal than to twist arms.

7. OK. In Human-Computer Interaction, as in Product Design, the main expressions of Design with Intent relate to designing specific affordances and constraints to guide users: shaping users’ perceptions of what actions are possible, and making some actions intentionally more difficult or impossible.

8. You can ‘design out’ affordances you don’t want the user to have – constraining the options available – here, to just ‘OK’, even if the user’s not OK with that – but it doesn’t always make for the best usability.

9. Or you can be a bit cleverer, and use a forcing function (a term coined by Donald Norman) – design the system so that the ‘right’ behaviour must occur before the user can take the next step. The example here is an interlock on a Toyota: to prevent the driver starting the car while it’s in gear, the ‘Start’ button is inoperative…

10. …unless the clutch pedal is held down…

11. …while the button’s pressed. I’ll admit it took me a while to figure that one out.

12. The best-known everyday safety interlock is on the microwave oven…

13. …where it will not operate unless the door is closed. Forcing functions generally aren’t subtle. They’re tending towards the coercive side of persuasion, but because they usually help us achieve something we want, such as keeping us safe, we don’t seem to mind too much.

14. Some affordance-manipulation can be a bit more subtly persuasive. Russell Beale, a computer scientist, used the term ‘Slanty Design’ to describe design which makes certain actions slightly more difficult, to discourage them. For example, these cigarette bins are sold on the basis that they have sloping tops not for aesthetic reasons, but so people don’t just leave cigarettes or litter on top of them.

15. Another aspect of affordance/constraint thinking is the persuasive power of defaults. We all know that many users leave settings exactly how they are, or simply choose the most prominent option: as designers, we can harness this power of choice architecture – as Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein describe it – to persuade users into making the ‘right’ choices.

16. Imagine if all washing machines simply defaulted to the most efficient cycle (maybe even sensing the load to determine this). This is, again, subtle persuasion, but could have a big impact on users’ behaviour.

17. Now, in manufacturing, it’s crucial that assembly workers follow the right procedure when building something. To a large extent these are similar problems to those we’ve just seen – we want the ‘user’ (in this case that worker) to take certain actions, probably in a certain order. Every ‘mistake’ ends up costing the company money, in one way or another. Shigeo Shingo, a Japanese engineer, believed that with clever enough ‘defensive’ design, based on observation of workers, it was possible to eliminate assembly defects altogether. He called it Poka-yoke – mistake-proofing, and many of the ideas parallel those of affordances and constraints.

18. We’re used to seeing one of the very simplest poka-yoke methods every day – the ‘snipped’ corner on SIM cards, memory cards, and so, on…

19. …which prevent ‘assembly’ errors by ensuring that they can only be inserted into devices one way.

20. This is a control poka-yoke – it actually prevents the error from occurring. These are effectively forcing functions, as discussed earlier.

21. Shingo also used warning poka-yokes extensively, where a worker (or a user) is alerted to an error condition – something’s not in the right place, or is missing, or fitted incorrectly. The seatbelt warning light here indicates to the driver that a seatbelt is not buckled. This kind of immediate feedback on user behaviour is an example of suggestion-at-the-right-moment, or kairos, as defined in Persuasive Technology. It’s the right moment to warn the driver to fasten the seat belt.

22. Volvo for many years offered a gearchange suggestion light, which (based on monitoring engine RPM and throttle position), ‘suggested’ to the driver when he or she should change gear, to ensure the best economy. That’s a simple, clever persuasive technology: it makes ‘correct’ behaviour easier by guiding the user.

23. The idea that designers might ‘inscribe’ intended behaviours into artefacts has, in various forms, been subject to some philosophical and sociological debate. Johan Redström, developing an argument by Richard Buchanan, has suggested that since all artefacts are designed with some vision or intention of how they are ultimately to be used, it may be that all design is persuasive.

24. The presence of a chair persuades me to sit down where I might not have done otherwise. Designing the chair to appear more comfortable makes it even more likely. And so on.

25. Bruno Latour and Madeleine Akrich have discussed the idea that designers can ‘script’ behaviours into artefacts. Jaap Jelsma gives the example of a dual-button toilet flush as seen here, which effectively scripts users into making a decision about their water usage. There is no default, quite deliberately; the user must make some kind of decision.

26. This discussion has many expressions in urban planning, in fact: how much does architecture control us? Langdon Winner asked ‘Do artefacts have politics?’

27. His most famous examples were these very low overpasses built over a number of parkways on Long Island, by Robert Moses – too low for buses to pass underneath, with the effect of making it more difficult for poorer people to visit the Jones Beach State Park.

28. But there’s always the danger in this area of ascribing to malice what might more reasonably be explained by other factors, and the use of Moses’ bridges as the eminent ‘artefacts with politics’ example has been challenged in recent years by a number of authors.

29. Nevertheless, it is clear that some artefacts do have politics. We saw those perch benches in Oxford earlier on. Now, rough sleeping, by the homeless or otherwise, is frowned upon by many public authorities.

30. Sometimes benches with central armrests are installed specifically to attempt to stop this behaviour, especially at airports and railway stations.

31. Some models of bench are even sold to authorities on the basis that they will ‘discourage overnight stays’.

32. Not that some users can’t find a way round this…

33. Not all such techniques are so ‘anti-user’. Spaces and seating arrangements can be designed to be sociopetal, that is, to persuade people to interact – the simplest technique is to face seats towards each other…

34. …it doesn’t always work, of course.

35. Transposing the ‘architectures of control’ concept to the digital world, Lawrence Lessig used the phrase “Code is law” to explain how the structure of the internet, and what actions are possible, effectively regulates and shapes behaviour online, regardless of what laws may actually apply. If the system makes it easy to copy music, it will happen. Simplicity is persuasive.

36. So-called technological protection measures such as digital rights management – DRM – can be seen as attempts by companies to lock down the freedom of behaviour afforded by the internet, and persuade consumers into adhering to specific business models drawn up in an offline world.

37. Some of the most prevalent efforts at designing persuasion are for purely commercial benefit. Aside from advertising itself…

38. …there are strategies such as the razor-blade model, where a product is designed to persuade the consumer into repeat purchases of consumables, by locking him or her into a particular format. Electronic authentication makes this easier to enforce: for example, some printers include a ‘handshake’ which ensures that only the original manufacturer’s (usually higher-priced) cartridges can be used. Such strategies tend towards the coercive side of persuasion.

39. So, that was a very quick run-through of examples and ideas from a range of disciplines. I hope you can see how the Design with Intent idea runs through it all. But how does the field of Persuasive Technology, as it is defined, fit with this? Much PT research focuses on persuasion with intended social benefit – such as improving health – but much persuasion in the world as a whole is about intended commercial benefit. These don’t have to be mutually exclusive, of course: a fitness equipment manufacturer or a gym persuading people to exercise fulfils both social and commercial benefit intentions.

40. So, it makes sense to think of these as two separate dimensions of the ‘Design with Intent’ space.
Another aspect is whether the impact on the immediate user is helpful or not. This is where some persuasion techniques may fall down: it might be better for society, in terms of energy saving, if you can’t put your TV on standby any more, but it’s likely to inconvenience you. This is the grey area above. So if this space represents all Design with Intent, then maybe PT, as it’s defined, is the area outlined with the dashed line: it’s centred on intended social benefit, usually (but not always) helpful to the immediate user, and possibly with intended commercial benefit too. Still, this is only one way of visualising the relationship: as the boundaries of Persuasive Technology as a field are debated and redrawn, we may find that visualisations illustrating other aspects, such as coercion vs. persuasion, and so on, become useful.

41. Going beyond what’s in the paper now, over the last few months we’ve considered and analysed many different examples from different fields, and have tried to classify these techniques to understand them better and synthesize similar ideas.

42. The techniques pretty much fall into five ‘approaches’ which, though always open to debate, are useful in defining the mind-set a designer might have in approaching the problem.

43. These techniques have then been incorporated into a ‘suggestion tool’, which, given a target behaviour, allows designers to explore applicable techniques.

44. …The target behaviours are abstract descriptions, but can be applied to many different problems; each breaks down further into more specific target behaviours.

45. The next stage of our research will be testing out this suggestion tool, both in practical workshop sessions with design students and then with design consultancies… and with an online version, too.
After that, the aim is to do user trials with prototype ‘persuasive’ products developed as a result of applying the suggestion tool to sustainable behaviour problems, comparing how well different techniques actually work in practice in terms of changing behaviour, saving energy or reducing waste.

46. To conclude, I hope this brief review of Design with Intent has been interesting, and more importantly, inspirational in terms of suggesting examples of behaviour-shaping design beyond the immediate Persuasive Technology field. Our research is only at a very early stage, but we hope in due course to be able to present some concrete results, applying ‘Design with Intent’ thinking to guiding user behaviour, specifically in sustainable design.

47. In the meantime, if you’re interested, please do have a look at the research blog – at danlockton.co.uk. Thanks for listening.

All photographs/images by Dan Lockton except:
Slide 6 – Oxford Cornmarket bench with teenagers – Stephanie Jenkins -
http://www.headington.org.uk/oxon/cornmarket/new_seat.htm
Slide 14 – two catalogue images – New Pig Corporation -
http://www.newpig.com
Slide 22 – Volvo 340/360 dashboard – Volvo 300 Mania forums -
http://www.volvo300mania.com/
Slide 27 – Wantagh Parkway overpass – Peacenic on Flickr -
http://www.flickr.com/photos/68841932@N00/73241931
Slide 28 – Jones Beach approach – New York Architecture -
http://www.nyc-architecture.com/BKN/BKN001.htm
Slide 29 – Sleeping on a Hyde Park Bench – David Basanta on Flickr -
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dbasanta/2093742562
Slide 31 – Georgetown bench – Belson Outdoors -
http://web.archive.org/web/20040417173248/http://www.belson.com/gbrec.htm
Slide 32 – ‘Happy homeless’ – Rick Abbott on Flickr -
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rickabbott/81779858

This presentation was given by Dan Lockton at Persuasive 2008, Oulu, Finland on 6 June 2008, based on the paper: Lockton, D, Harrison, D. and Stanton, N.: Design with intent: Persuasive technology in a wider context, in H. Oinas-Kukkonen et al. (eds.): Persuasive 2008, LNCS 5033. Berlin Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2008. pp. 274 – 278.

A preprint version is available free from http://hdl.handle.net/2438/2138

*The clock is a Mayhem Aurora, designed by Rob Leeks and Matt Chapman, and in reality does not flash when the time isn’t set. But I didn’t have a VCR handy to photograph…

One-way screws, such as the above (image from Designing Against Vandalism, ed. Jane Sykes, The Design Council, London, 1979) are an interesting alternative to the usual array of tamper-proof ’security fasteners’ (which usually require a special tool to fit and remove). There’s a very interesting illustrated listing of different systems here.

A fastener requiring a special tool is effectively addressing the “Access, use or occupation based on user characteristics” target behaviour – and is functionally equivalent to a ‘what you have’ security system such as a padlock, except that anyone can look at almost any engineering catalogue and buy whatever special tools are needed to undo most security fasteners, pretty cheaply and easily, whereas it’s still a bit more difficult to obtain padlock master keys.

However, this kind of one-way clutch head screw, which can be tightened with a normal flat screwdriver, but is very difficult to undo using any tool (without destroying it) can be thought of as addressing a slightly different target behaviour: this is “No access, use or occupation, in a specific manner, by any user”. Even if the original installer wants to undo the screw, he or she can’t do it without destroying it (e.g. drilling it out). A few of the other systems illustrated on the Security Fasteners website also have this property:

I’m particularly intrigued by the Shear Nuts and No Go enclosures (last two images above) – these two types effectively self-destruct/render themselves permanent as they are fixed into place. Something about this step-change in affordance fascinates me, but I’m not sure why exactly; it’s a similar idea to a computer program deleting itself, or Claude Shannon’s ‘Beautiful Machine’ existing only to switch itself off.

A step further would be a fastener or other device which (intentionally) destroys itself if the wrong tool (by implication an unauthorised user) tries to open/undo it, but which will undo perfectly well if the correct tool is used – along the lines of the cryptex in the Da Vinci Code, just as an ATM will retain a card if the wrong PIN is entered three times: it’s both tamper-evident and limits access. What other cryptex-style measures are there designed into products and systems?

Making the user more efficient: Design for sustainable behaviour [PDF, 160kb] is a brief review of approaches to designing products and systems which could shape or change users’ behaviour in an environmentally friendly way; if you’ve followed this blog, there’s probably little new in it, but it’s (hopefully) a useful summary. (At present that PDF is hosted on this website, but once Brunel allows me access to deposit papers in its institutional repository, BURA, I’ll change the above link. UPDATED: Changed link 2nd May)

Abstract: User behaviour is a significant determinant of a product’s environmental impact; while engineering advances permit increased efficiency of product operation, the user’s decisions and habits ultimately have a major effect on the energy or other resources used by the product. There is thus a need to change users’ behaviour. A range of design techniques developed in diverse contexts suggest opportunities for engineers, designers and other stakeholders working in the field of sustainable innovation to affect users’ behaviour at the point of interaction with the product or system, in effect ‘making the user more efficient’.

Approaches to changing users’ behaviour from a number of fields are reviewed and discussed, including: strategic design of affordances and behaviour-shaping constraints to control or affect energy or other resource-using interactions; the use of different kinds of feedback and persuasive technology techniques to encourage or guide users to reduce their environmental impact; and context-based systems which use feedback to adjust their behaviour to run at optimum efficiency and reduce the opportunity for user-affected inefficiency. Example implementations in the sustainable engineering and ecodesign field are suggested and discussed.

Keywords: ecodesign; sustainability; managing use; managing consumption;
behaviour change; sustainable innovation; persuasive technology

Until it appears in the journal (probably towards the end of 2008) I’m not sure what the guidance is on referencing, but something like Lockton, D., Harrison, D.J., Stanton, N.A. (2008) ‘Making the user more efficient: Design for sustainable behaviour’, To appear in: International Journal of Sustainable Engineering (forthcoming) is probably about right.

*Required disclaimer:

This is a preprint of an article whose final and definitive form will be published in the International Journal of Sustainable Engineering. © 2008 Taylor & Francis; International Journal of Sustainable Engineering is available online at: http://journalsonline.tandf.co.uk/

Basics of the DwI Method, v.0.1

1. Assuming you have a ‘problem’ involving the interaction between one of more users, and a product, system or environment (hereafter, the system), the first stage is to express what your intended target behaviour is. What do you actually want to achieve?

2. Attempt to describe your intended target behaviour in terms of one of the general target behaviours for the interaction, listed in the table below. (This is, of course, very much a rough work in progress at present, and these will undoubtedly change and be added to.) Your intended target behaviour may seem to map to more than one general target behaviour: this may mean that you actually have two ‘problems’ to solve.

3. You’re presented with a set of mechanisms – loosely categorised as physical, psychological, economic, legal or structural – which, it’s suggested, could be applied to achieve the general target behaviour, and thus your intended target behaviour. Some mechanisms have a narrow focus – dealing specifically with the interaction between the user and the system – and some are much wider in scope – looking outside the immediate interaction. Different mechanisms can be combined, of course: the idea here is to inspire ’solutions’ to your ‘problem’ rather than actually specify them.

An example

This example is one that I’ve covered extensively on this blog: the most common ’solutions’ are, generally, very unfriendly, but it’s clear to most of us that the ‘wider scope’ mechanisms are, ultimately, more desirable.

Sleeping on a bench in Hyde Park, London. Photo by David Basanta

Introduction

A number of benches in a city-centre park are occupied overnight or during parts of the day by homeless people. The city council/authorities (‘they’) decide that this is a problem: they don’t want homeless people sleeping on the benches in the park. Expressed differently, their intended target behaviour is no homeless people sleeping on the benches.

So, which of the general target behaviours is closest to this?

Currently the list (disclaimer: v.0.1, will change a lot, letter allocations are not significant) is:

A1:  Access, use or occupation based on user characteristics
A2:  Access, use or occupation based on user behaviour
B:   No access, use or occupation, in a specific manner, by any user
C:   User provided with functionality only when environmental criteria satisfied
D:   Separate flows and occupation; users have no influence on each other
E:   Interaction between users or groups of users
F:   No user-created blockages or congestion caused by multiple users
G:   Controlled rate of flow or passage of users
H:   User follows process or path
I:    User pays the maximum price which still results in a sale

While we might think the ‘discriminatory’ implications of A1 and A2 are relevant here given our assumptions about the authorities’ motives, in fact ‘they’ probably don’t want anyone sleeping on the benches, regardless of whether he or she’s actually homeless, just having a lunchtime nap before returning to a corner office at Goldman Sachs, or anywhere in between. They don’t mind someone sitting on the bench (grudgingly, that would seem to be its purpose), as long as it’s not for too long (that’s another ‘problem’, though with very similar ‘solutions’), but they don’t want anyone sleeping on it. It’s not exactly the same problem as preventing anyone lying down (we might imagine a bright light or loudspeaker positioned over the bench, which allows people to lie down but makes it difficult to sleep), but the problems, and most solutions, are very close.

So it turns out that B, ‘No access, use or occupation, in a specific manner, by any user’, best matches the intended target behaviour in this case:

From mechanisms to ’solutions’

Looking at the diagram (PDF, 25k, or click image below), a number of possible mechanisms are suggested to achieve this target behaviour. (Again, a disclaimer: this is very much work in progress, and many mechanisms are missing at this stage.) There are physical, psychological, economic, legal and structural mechanisms, some with a narrow focus, and some much wider in scope.

I’ll try to pick out and discuss a few mechanisms – physical, psychological and structural (leaving out the legal and economic for the moment) – to demonstrate how they can be applied in the context of the bench example, but first it’s important to note two things:

The most obvious physical mechanism for addressing the issue is the placing of material – to interrupt the surface of the bench, or perhaps even to cause injury (usually not done deliberately with park benches, but surely done, at least in the sense of conditioning the user not to repeat the interactions, with some pigeon spikes, barbed wire, anti-climb and various anti-sit spikes).

Interrupting the surface of the bench is usually done by adding central armrests (which do at least serve another function in addition), as illustrated here:

A new bench with armrests being installed at Richmond Station, just as London Overground takes over from Silverlink; and the Belson Georgetown Bench, “Redesigned to face contemporary urban realities, this bench comes standard with a centre arm to discourage overnight stays in its comfortable embrace.”

Of course, it is possible to sleep on a bench with central armrests, but it’s certainly discouraging, as the Belson quote suggests.

Photo by Rick Abbott

Placing of material could equally be subtractive rather than additive – so interrupting the surface might also suggest removing elements to prevent or discourage sleeping. This could be in the form of removing every (say) third section of a bench, thus making the remaining length too short to lie down on properly (this has been done in some airport lounges), making the benches shorter altogether, or even separating the seats into ’single-occupancy benches’ – which would seem to be suggested by the spatial mechanism:

 
“A man tries to sleep on a deliberately shortened bench at the park” – photo from this excellent article by Yumiko Hayakawa discussing anti-homeless measures in Tokyo; ‘Single-occupancy benches’ in Helsinki – photo by Ville Tikkanen

Indeed, simply narrowing the bench (making a kind of perch), and/or removing the backrest from a bench which already has central armrests, so that someone can’t even lean back to doze, would also count in terms of removing material.

Designs suggested by the orientation of material mechanisms are also fairly common – most often, a simply angled seat surface, as used on many bus-stop perches or these benches:

“Can’t Lie Down, Can’t Lean Back – A man has a hard time getting a break on this partitioned, forward-leaning bench at Tokyo’s Ueno Onshi park”. Photo from Yumiko Hayakawa’s article.

The ‘Lean Seat’ by Joscelyn Bingham

Curved surfaces, both convex and concave, can also be employed:

 Convex surface tubular bench in Tokyo – photo from Yumiko Hayakawa’s article; Concave surface bus shelter perch in Shanghai – photo by Albert Sun

And curvature can be combined with the use of armrests (and height – which suggests that spatial might also be expanded to include something like “dimensional change to alter distance between elements of system”) to create something like the ‘Oxford Cornmarket montrosity’, which might prevent people sleeping on it, but certainly doesn’t stop people occupying it in a way the designers didn’t intend:

The ‘benches’ in Oxford’s Cornmarket Street, discussed here and here. Second photo by Stephanie Jenkins

Looking at some of the other relevant physical mechanisms, it’s worth noting that change of environmental characteristic – ‘local temperature change’ – also finds an expression in the convex Tokyo bench pictured above – as Yumiko Hayakawa notes in the original article:

The hard curved surface of this stainless-steel bench, too hot in summer, too cold in winter, repels all but one visitor to Ikebukuro West Park.

We might also think of positioning a street lamp right above a bench – to make it took bright to sleep there easily at night – as a similar tactic in this vein, ‘local illumination change’.

What about the other relevant physical mechanisms? Change of material characteristic could mean a bench that deforms in some way when someone lies on it, or maybe has an uncomfortable surface texture (nails?). But both of these would probably preclude the bench’s use for sitting, in addition to sleeping. Movement or oscillation could suggest a bench which is balanced somehow so that it requires the user’s feet to be on the ground, in a normal sitting position, to keep it stable, and which would fall over (extra degree of freedom introduced) when someone tried to lie down on it, or maybe a bench which is sited on a turntable continually rotating, or a vibrating base, so that the user’s feet on the ground are again needed for stabilising, and someone lying down would fall off. None of these is an especially realistic ’solution’, but would all address the ‘problem’ even if simultaneously introducing others.

(At this point, we might consider that if the ‘problem’ mainly occurs at night, we might want a bench that only becomes un-sleepable on – or unusable – at night. This would be best addressed by general target behaviour C, ‘User provided with functionality only when environmental criteria satisfied’ – many of the suggested mechanisms will be similar, but with conditional elements to them – if it is dark, or after a certain time, the bench might automatically retract into the ground, or become uncomfortable, if it weren’t already.)

As noted on the diagram (PDF, 25k), I’ve (so far) had a bit of a mental blind-spot in coming up with wider-scope physical mechanisms to address this general target behaviour. The only sensible ones so far relate to applying the placing of material on the approach to the system, so in this case, it might mean putting the bench on an island surrounded by mud, water or spikes and so on, which doesn’t really seem useful. This wider-scope line-of-thinking needs much further development for some types of mechanisms, although it’s fairly obvious where it relates to making an alternative system more attractive.

Narrow-scope psychological mechanisms

Turning to psychological mechanisms, with both narrow and wider scopes, the emphasis pretty much comes down to a ’stick’ or ‘carrot’ approach: either scare/warn/otherwise put off the user from sleeping on the bench, or make an alternative more attractive/available. It’s about creating unattractive perceived affordances, perhaps, where the physical mechanisms are about removing real affordances.

From the narrow scope point-of-view, some of the applicable psychological ’solutions’ might include: ‘warning’ potential sleepers off with signage or colour schemes (not that this would do much; it’s more likely to provoke amusement, as in the photo below); making benches which look uncomfortable (whether or not they are); paying(?) scary or unattractive other ‘users’ to hang around the bench to scare people away (which perhaps defeats the object slightly); or, probably most likely, using overt surveillance of the bench, by humans or cameras, which brings in considerations of the legal mechanisms too (and maybe economic, in the form of fines). Another aspect of surveillance is making the (unwanted) interaction visible to other users – using the pressure of social norms to ’shame’ people into not doing something (positioning the sink outside the bathroom, in a kind of ante-room visible to others, is a good example), but it’s difficult to see how to apply this to the bench example – even if the bench is, say, positioned where lots of people will see the user sleeping on it, the pressure to vacate it is pretty low. This is a kind of ‘public’ feedback; feedback itself is an extremely important psychological mechanism in interaction design, but seems (from my research so far) to be much more applicable to some of the other general target behaviours.

 
A genuine sign in Orlando, via Boing Boing; and some applicable wider scope psychological mechanisms.

The wider scope psychological mechanisms are much more positive – indeed, more positive than anything else so far in this example. Here, the aim is to make alternative systems – i.e. an alternative to sleeping on the park bench, whatever it might be – more attractive. This is where this sort of thing comes into play:

 
Sean Godsell’s ‘House in a Park’, a bench that folds out into a rudimentary shelter (above) and (below) Bus Shelter House, which “converts into an emergency overnight accommodation. The bench lifts to reveal a woven steel mattress and the advertising hoarding is modified to act as a dispenser of blankets, food, and water.”

Note that at this level, the alternative systems themselves are attractive (more attractive than sleeping on the park bench) by simply fulfilling users’ needs rather than any psychological ‘tricks’. There is a lesson there.

‘Guerrilla’ responses by users frustrated at heavy-handed anti-user measures don’t directly have a place in the DwI Method, at least as currently constituted, but in this case, for example, providing temporary cardboard seating (/sleeping benches) or even parts that fit over benches with central armrests to permit sleeping once again, as Crosbie Fitch suggests, are worth thinking about:

Perhaps also, for each anti-sit seat design, one could come up with cardboard add-ons that re-enable long-term seating and recumbence. These could be labelled “Temporary Seat Repairs”, “Protective Seat Covers”, “Citizen City Seats”, or something far wittier.

It’s the structural mechanisms which suggest the more large-scale ’solutions’, from provision of alternative systems (as in the Sean Godsell examples above) to actually removing the need for anyone to sleep rough. Ultimately, of course, that’s a better goal than any of the above – anything discussed in this article – but it’s not really a ’solution’, rather a desirable aim, or even an intended target behaviour in itself, addressing a social issue rather than a ‘design’ one. Addressing the ‘disease’ rather than merely disguising the symptoms is surely preferable in the long-term.

Alternatively, some cities have simply removed benches altogether where there is a ‘homeless problem…

Benches stripped in Washington DC – “A small homeless population [had grown] there within the past few months”. photo by Fredo Alvarez.

…’removal of system entirely‘ being the structural mechanism there: doing absolutely nothing to help the homeless users, and in the process removing the benches for everyone who uses the park.

Conclusions

The choice of such a negative example for demonstrating this very early version of the Design With Intent Method – where almost all the ’solutions’ suggested are anti-user and generally unfriendly – reflects, pretty much, where my ‘architectures of control’ research came from in the first place. Most of the examples posted on the site over the past couple of years have generally been about stopping users doing something, forcing them to do something they don’t want to do, or tricking them into doing something against their own best interests – certainly more than have been about more positive efforts to help and guide users.

I thought that using the DwI Method initially to see if I could ‘get inside the head’ (possibly) of the ‘they’ who implement this kind of disciplinary architecture would be a useful insight, before applying the method to something more user-friendly and worthwhile – which willl be the next task.

*As ‘Silverman’ cautioned before, the aim must not be to remove the use of engineering/design intuition – most creative people would not respond well to that anyway – but primarily to inspire possible solutions.

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

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

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

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

In this article from Communications of the ACM from January 2007, Russell Beale uses the term slanty design to describe “design that purposely reduces aspects of functionality or usability”:

It originated from an apocryphal story that some desks in the US Library of Congress in Washington, DC, are angled down toward the patron, with a glass panel over the wood, so when papers are being viewed, nothing harmful (like coffee cups, food and ink pens) can be put on top of them. This makes them less usable (from a user-centric point of view) but much more appropriate for their overall purpose.
…
[S]lanty design is useful when the system must address wider goals than the user might have, when, say, they wish to do something that in the grander scheme of things is less than desirable.

The angled lid on this cigarette bin prevents butts being placed on top; the cone shape of cup subtly discourages users from leaving it on the table.

We’ve looked before on this site at a couple of literally ’slanty’ examples – notably, cigarette bins with angled lids and paper cone cups (above) – and indeed “the common technique of architects to use inclined planes to prevent people from leaving things, such as coffee cups, on flat spaces” is noted on the Designweenie blog here – but in his article, Beale expands the scope of the term to encompass interfaces or interaction methods designed to prevent or discourage certain user behaviour, for strategic reasons: in essence, what I’ve tried to corral under the heading ‘architectures of control‘ for the last few years, but with a different way of arriving at the idea:

We need more than usability to make things work properly. Design is (or should be) a conversation between users and design experts and between desired outcomes and unwanted side effects… [U]ser-centred design is grounded in the user’s current behavior, which is often less than optimal.
…
Slanty design incorporates the broader message, making it difficult for users to do unwanted things, as well as easy to do wanted things. Designers need to design for user non-goals – the things users do not want to do or should not be able to do even if they want to [my emphases]. If usability is about making it easy for users to do what they must do, then we need to have anti-usability as well well, making it difficult for them to do the things we may not want them to do.

He gives the example of Gmail (below), where Google has (or had – the process is apprently not so difficult now) made it difficult for users to delete email – “Because Google uses your body of email to mine for information it uses to target the ads it delivers to generate revenue; indeed, deleting it would be detrimental to the service” but that in fact, this strategy might be beneficial for the user – “By providing a large amount of storage space for free, Gmail reduces any resource pressure, and by making the deletion process difficult it tries to re-educate us to a new way of operating, which also happens to achieve Google’s own wider business goals.” This is an interesting way of looking at it, and somewhat reminscent of the debate on deleting an Amazon or eBay account – see also Victor Lombardi’s commentary on the where the balance lies.

However, from my point of view, if there’s one thing which has become very clear from investigating architectures of control in products, systems and environments, it’s that the two goals Beale mentions – “things users do not want to do” and things users “should not be able to do” – only coincide in a few cases, and with a few products, and a few types of user. Most poka-yoke examples would seem to be a good fit, as would many of the design methods for making it easier to save energy on which my PhD is focusing, but outside these areas, there are an awful lot of examples where, in general, the goal of the user conflicts with the goal of the designer/manufacturer/service provider/regulator/authority, and it’s the user’s ability which is sacrificed in order to enforce or encourage behaviour in line with what the ‘other’ party wants. “No-one wakes up in the morning wanting to do less with his or her stuff,” as Cory Doctorow puts it.

Beale does recognise that conflicts may occur – “identify wider goals being pursued by other stakeholders, including where they conflict with individual goals” – and that an attempt should be made to resolve them, but – personally – I think an emphasis on using ’slanty’ techniques to assist the user (and assist the ‘other party’, whether directly or simply through improving customer satisfaction/recommendation) would be a better direction for ’slanty design’ to orient itself.

“Slanty-designed baggage carousel. Sloping floor keeps the area clear”. From ‘Slanty Design’ article by Russell Beale.

Indeed, it is this aim of helping individual users while also helping the supersystem (and actually using a slant, in fact) which informs a great suggestion on which Beale elaborates, airport baggage carousels with a slanted floor (above):

The scrum of trolleys around a typical [carousel] makes it practically impossible to grab a bag when it finally emerges. A number of approaches have been tried. Big signs… a boundary line… a wide strip of brightly coloured floor tiles…

My slanty design would put a ramp of about 30 degrees extending two meters or so up toward the belt… It would be uncomfortable to stand on, and trolleys would not stay there easily, tending to roll off backward or at least be awkward to handle. I might also add a small dip that would catch the front wheels, making it even more difficult to get the trolley or any other wheeled baggage on it in the first place, but not enough to trip up a person.

If I was being really slanty, I’d also incorporate 2 cm-high bristles in the surface, making it a real pain for the trolleys on it and not too comfy for the passengers to stay there either. Much easier for people to remain (with their trolleys) on the flat floor than negotiate my awkward hill. We’d retain the space we need, yet we could manage the short dash forward, up the hill, to grab our bags, then return to our trolleys, clearing the way for the next baggage-hungry passenger.

There are some very interesting ideas embodied in this example – I’m not sure that using bristles on such a slope would be especially easy for wheelchair users, but the overall idea of helping both the individual user, and the collective (and probably the airport authority too: reducing passenger frustration and necessity for supervision of the carousel), is very much something which this kind of design, carefully thought out, can bring about.

Ten years ago, teams from Cranfield University and Electrolux Industrial Design collaborated on an ‘eco-kitchen’, a family of related concepts for a kitchen of the future. Part of the intention was to demonstrate that eco-design could be a positive spur to innovation, rather than merely an ‘environmental cost-cutting’ exercise. The project is explained in this article from The Journal of Sustainable Product Innovation [PDF] (starting on page 51).

What’s especially interesting from the architectures of control / design for behaviour change perspective is the Smart Sink (above), which, very simply, uses a membrane for the bowl, expanding (treefrog-vocal-sac-like,) as it’s filled, thus making it much more easy to control the amount of water being used – along with some other neat features in the same vein:

The ‘Smart Sink’ is the centre of household water management. A membrane sink expands to minimise water use and a smart tap switches from jet to spray to mist to suit customer needs. A consumption meter and a water-level indicator in the main basin gives feedback on rates and level of water usage. Household grey water is managed visibly by an osmosis purifier and a cyclone filter located in the pedestal, and linked to the household grey water storage.

We’ve looked before at taps (faucets) with built-in water meters, in various forms, but the Smart Sink concept goes beyond this in terms of assisting the user control his or her own water use. Gentle persuasion or guidance rather than external control, but guidance that gives the user helpful feedback. Ten years later: are membrane sinks available? Why not? What else could be done in this line of thinking?

The liquid detection stickers in mobile phones, which allow manufacturers and retailers to ascertain if a phone has got wet, and thus reject warranty claims (whether judiciously/appropriately or not), seem to be concerning a lot of people worldwide. Around a quarter of this site’s visitors are searching for information on this subject, and the comments on last October’s post on the subject contain a wealth of useful experience and advice.

This current thread on uk.legal.moderated goes into more depth on the issue, and how the burden of proof works in this case (at least in the UK). While informed opinion seems to be that the stickers will only change colour when actual liquid is present within the phone, rather than mere moisture or damp, this may well include condensation forming within the casing, as well as the more obvious dropping-of-phone-into-puddle and so on. The main point of contention seems to be that the sticker may change colour (perhaps gradually) and the phone continue working perfectly, but when an unrelated problem occurs and the phone is taken in for repairs under warranty, the presence of the ‘voided’ sticker may be used as a universal warranty get-out even if the actual problem is something different.

Tilt detection
Along these lines, one of the posts tells of a similarly interesting design tactic – tilt-detectors on larger hardware:

30 years in the IT industry and associated customer service tells me they are trying it on and most people buy it. In the olden days, hardware used to come with a similar red dot system indicating the kit had been tilted more than 45 degrees and the manufacturers claimed the kit could not be installed and had to be written off.

Of course, 99.9% of the time the kit was fine, but they had a get-out from a warranty claim or so they thought. When the buyers tried to claim on their insurance or against the transport companies insurers the loss adjusters got involved and invariably the kit was installed and worked fine for years rather than the insurers paying out.

In some cases, of course, tilt-detectors were (are still?) necessary in this role. A piece of equipment with multiple vertically cantilevered PCBs laden with heavy components – relays, for example – might well be damaged if the PCBs were tilted away from the vertical. Certainly some devices with small moving coil components would seem as though they may be damaged by being turned upside down, for example. (Do the ultra-fine damper wires on an aperture-grille CRT monitor such as a Trinitron need to be kept in a particular orientation when handling the monitor?)

This patent, published in 1984, from which the above images were extracted, describes an especially clever ‘interlock’ system using two liquid-based detectors arranged so that if the device/package is tilted and then tilted back again, the second detector will then be triggered:

…it is desirable that the tilt detectors not be resettable. In particular, it must be possible to combine a package with at least a pair of the tilt detectors such that attempting to reset one would cause the other to be tilted beyond its pre-determined maximum angle so that the total combination would always afford an indication that the tilt beyond that allowed had been effected.

This is something of a poka-yoke – but as with the phone liquid-detection stickers, it’s being used to detect undesirable customer/handler behaviour rather than actually to prevent it happening. Other than making a package too heavy to tilt, I am not sure exactly how we might design something which actually prevents the tilting problem, aside from rectifying the design problem which makes tilting a problem in the first place (even filling the airspace in the case with non-conductive, low-density foam might help here).

But there’s certainly a way the tilt-detector could be improved to help and inform the handler rather than simply ‘condemn’ the device. For example, it could let out an audible alarm if the package or device is tilted, say, 20 degrees, to allow the handler to rectify his or her mistake before reaching the damaging 45 degrees, whilst still permanently changing colour if 45 degrees is reached. In the long run, it would probably help educated users about how to handle the device rather than just ‘punishing’ them for an infraction. I’m sure that mercury-switch (or whatever the current non-toxic equivalent is) alarms have been used in this way (e.g. on a vending machine), but how often are they used to help the user rather than alert security?

The patent description goes on to mention using tamper-evident methods of attaching the detectors to the device or packaging – this is another interesting area, which I am sure we will cover at some point on the blog.

One of the things that I’m often asked, mainly by design students intrigued by the idea of working for themselves once they graduate, is just how to go about doing it: how to raise your profile, and find the right projects to take on. Having really only been marginally successful in this area, I decided to interview Ben Wilson, with whom I’ve worked on a couple of projects, and who’s achieved a great deal working for himself in this field. Ben’s blog, along with his brothers, is a great photostream-style travelogue of interesting products, vehicles, graphic design, places and influences.

Left: The Tilting Trike in arm-propelled mode. Right: The Downlow Lowrider

DL: What are some of your highest profile projects?

BW: I’ve done lots of different projects – I think I’m probably best known for the work I’ve done in transportation and especially in bicycles and bicycle-related design.

A project that won some awards was the Tilting Trike which started off as a project at the Royal College of Art and then was taken on as a research project within the Helen Hamlyn Research Centre. That won a few awards and got quite well known. Before that, I was known as ‘Bicycle Ben’ and people thought that was, sort of, all that I did. About nine or ten years ago, I designed a low-rider recumbent bicycle – at the time, that attracted a lot of attention and press, so I was very well known for that. But since then, I’ve gone on to work in lots of different areas – interior, product, industrial design.

I think another project that’s quite well known – well, sometimes it’s not accredited to me so much but I was very much involved from the concept all the way through to production – is the Manfrotto FigRig, developed and patented worldwide and manufactured by Manfrotto. There’s that product and there’s the work I’ve done with flat-pack furniture – the Chairfix. I suppose they’re the highest profile projects, but they’re by no means all the projects that I’ve done. They’re the ones that stick out.

Left: The Tilting Trike in foot-pedalled mode. Right: The Manfrotto FigRig, with Mike Figgis

You’ve certainly been involved with a lot of projects. I suppose other young designers, thinking they’d like to go into business for themselves, would be especially interested in how you got started doing this. What made you want to go down the path of working for yourself as opposed to, say, taking a ‘normal’ design job?

Probably because I couldn’t get a job in product design. I’ve always had a reasonable entrepreneurial streak within me – I think that probably stems from my parents. They were both self-employed, they were both designers, so I was immersed within a kind of very creative family and household. But also, seeing the way they acted and talked on the phone and worked – I think there was that, too. It kind of stemmed from trying to get experience, finding it very difficult to get experience, and especially experience that I wanted to gain.

And, by default, I suppose: I created this object, the low-rider bicycle. I’d sold one before I graduated, so I realised there was a market for it. I technically could manufacture them – I made it myself, I prototyped it and made it myself so that was me, that’s what I had to promote myself, so in that respect, I could say “Can you make it? Yes I can”. There wasn’t one day when I said “Let’s start Ben Wilson Design”.

Then I went back to college, but even when I was doing my MA at the Royal College of Art, I was always doing a little bit here and a bit there – freelance and bits and pieces.

That’s interesting how you ‘fell’ into working for yourself like that. But a lot of your projects seem to have led on to others – you’ve come to the attention of someone because of one project, or a company has thought “That’s good; we’ll get him to do something.” Would you say that’s an important way of finding new work, as a freelancer?

Definitely. I’d say the stepping-stone effect is in everything. Every project that I do is gearing me up for the next. The research, or the techniques, will be used in something that’s done later on. So, yes. It gets infuriating when people – a bit like the category ‘Bike Ben’ – just expect me to do bikes. I love doing bikes but to a certain extent, that’s not all I want to do all the time. But just like in anything, if someone becomes a kind of specialist… say I needed some upholstered furniture, it would be good for me to talk to some people who have quite a lot of experience doing that, because I’d be halving the time by learning from their experience. So, always that’s the way. You tend to become specialist; although I haven’t tried to become a master of anything, hopefully I’ve build up good experience in many different areas.

FIXED, Ben’s exhibition in London’s Design Museum Tank focuses on fixed-gear bikes

So how have you gone about getting known? You’ve got some very high profile attention from, the Design Museum, the British Council, and so on. Did this come about through you approaching them, or through them approaching you, or a mixture?

A mixture. But I think predominantly it’s the snowball effect. You start off with one thing – take my bicycle. Through my brother, there was a space available in Farringdon where I could show the bicycle, in an area where there were a lot of publishing houses. It gained some press attention, and once one article comes out in the press – just like if something goes on a blog – it spirals, and it spider-webs, and it goes out everywhere. And I think that’s an interesting side of how ideas get spread.

So it’s worth doing that? It’s worth young designers making the effort to get their projects out there so that people see them.

Very much so. I’m a really strong believer in getting stuff out – to the extent where I’m asked by some companies to do pure brand work, looking at developing their brands for them, which I find very interesting. I’ve worked for different ad agencies – you might see that as very different to my other design, but it’s not really, it’s all creative output and it’s a mindset of how you think. It’s important to promote yourself and be as creative with how you market your identity, who you are and what you want to say about yourself. I don’t show at Milan: it’s mainly because I haven’t really been asked to. If someone wanted to fund me to do something for Milan, I would.

Take London Design Week, coming up soon. As far as I know, I’m not showing anything. It’s not necessarily out of choice – although it’s a great time and place to show your work, it’s also a saturated market. There could be better times to show work, for different audiences as well. That’s nothing against the idea – I have had exhibitions at that time, but I think it’s about taking opportunities when they come, and utilising them.

You do a lot of self-directed projects as well, don’t you – your own projects alongside work that clients have asked you to do? Would you say it’s definitely worth a freelancer trying to do that?

Absolutely. Aside from the potential revenue if the project’s successful, it’s keeping your mind active on new challenges. There’s that impetus that shows through in college or university projects – why you’re interested in something, why you want to investigate it – but then when you leave, many people almost drift into often mind-numbing design work. I know and probably you too know people who are in the creative industries but find it really difficult to rekindle the excitement they used to have about design. But even work for clients may feed into something that I can use on one of my own projects.

Chairfix is a good example of a self-initiated project. It came about because I was fed up with building bicycles because of the time that they took, and I wanted to exploit a process [CNC technology], and within that, I developed an object, and then wanted to show it to the public. So I organised my first show, up in the West End at Aram, and got a really good response, and from that I launched that product. I sold a considerable amount of them, and made a significant financial gain – I don’t want to talk about figures but I think taking responsibility and full ownership of a product yourself does mean that you don’t have to deal with poor royalties. You don’t have to sell so much of something to claw back some of the R & D that you put in. What it taught me as well – it makes you business savvy, it makes you go into negotiations, it makes you into discuss things with clients on a different basis.

A number of graphically customised versions of Chairfix were made available at the launch, including this by Ben’s brother Oscar

That’s something a lot of young designers have no experience of, and haven’t been taught. It’s difficult to get that kind of knowledge unless you actually do it practically yourself, with an actual business.

Very much so. And also – say you do have some experience within a consultancy and are starting to do some work for yourself. The jump is from working with big corporate companies, dealing with big contracts with big money, to that middle ground. Even if you’re not employing ten people, your turnover needs to be a reasonable amount just to keep your head above water. A global brand is not going to pay me [as a self-employed designer] as much as they would an established design studio with huge overheads. But they’re buying a different sort of thing. I think you have to make sure that you place yourself correctly within that market.

So what would your advice be to a young designer, perhaps, just starting out from university or from college, or still there maybe, with this dream of working for him or herself? Is there any simple advice you could give, other than “Just get on with it, just do it”?

You’ve got to do it. If that’s what you really want you’ve got to think a lot about that dream, because it takes over your life, it’s incredibly hard work, but it’s incredibly rewarding. Those are the realities of being self-employed. That aside, you need to think about who you are, what you’re doing, and why you’re doing it on your own, and how you’re going to brand that, how people are going to perceive what you’re showing. The opportunities are really good – it’s a lot easier now than when I started off. Like going to a photocopy shop and sending information in the post – things are different now, you can send an e-mail and hit so many different people.

You really have to go for it. I’ll never forget one phone conversation – at this time I was working out of my bedroom in my parents’ house – and someone phoned up saying “Can I speak to the managing director of Downlow Cycle Co?” (that’s sort of the title I went under). My mum answered the phone, not pretneding to be my secretary, but said “Yes, I shall just get him for you,” and it was someone enquiring about a really big order. I remember thinking, do I say “Well I’m just a small man in a bedroom, begging, borrowing and stealing to build these bikes,” or do I walk? Maybe he wants to think I’m a big business? I never ever lied, but neither did I tell him that I wasn’t running a multi-million pound corporation. So I think in that repsect, you have to think on your feet.

Also, you have to take opportunities as they come. Be confident and look at the possibilites in lots of different ways. It’s about both running with opportunity, and making your own. People say “Ooh, you’re a lucky person in life”. Certain people say that to me. But I think often, you make your own luck to a large degree. There are always opportunities. There are shops in London that are vacant. If you wanted to rent one for a year it would be a fortune, but if you wanted it for two weeks, you could probably cut a deal with a savvy landlord. There’s certain things like that, that really can work. I think you have to be creative with your own identity, your branding and how you get known as you have to be with the actual products, whatever you’re designing.

That’s some very good advice there, from someone who’s put it into practice very successfully. Thank you very much Ben.

Ben Wilson Design | Wilson Brothers’ Blog

Long overdue, I’m currently reading Bruce Schneier’s excellent Beyond Fear, and realising that in many ways, security thinking overlaps with architectures of control: the goal of so many systems is to control users’ behaviour or to deny the user the ability to perform certain actions. I’ll post a fuller comparison and analysis in due course, but one example Bruce mentions in passing seemed worth blogging separately:

Nokia spends about a hundred times more money per phone on battery security than on communications security. The security system senses when a consumer uses a third-party battery and switches the phone into maximum power-consumption mode; the point is to ensure that consumers buy only Nokia batteries.

Nokia is prepared to spend a considerable amount of money solving a security problem that it perceives – it loses revenue if customers buy batteries from someone else – even though that solution is detrimental to consumers.

As a battery authentication method, this is more subtle than the systems we’ve looked at before, which actually refuse to allow the device to operate if a non-original-manufacturer battery (or perhaps charger) is used.

Nokia’s system attempts to persuade the customer that the new (cheaper) battery he or she has bought is “no good” by making the phone discharge the battery more quickly – in an extremely underhanded way. From the point of view of the (uninformed) consumer, though, it makes Nokia look good. “Oh, that cheap battery I bought is rubbish, it doesn’t seem to hold its charge. Nokia make them so much better, guess I should stick to them in future.”

But if the Nokia batteries were genuinely ‘better’ than the cheap replacement ones, surely this kind of underhanded tactic wouldn’t be necessary?

P.S. I have no idea whether this Nokia ‘trick’ is real/common/still used, as Beyond Fear has no references, or whether other manufacturers do something similar (as opposed to outright battery authentication-and-denial). I’ll ask a friend at Nokia.

P.P.S. Jason Kottke also noted this tactic back in 2003.

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.

We’ve looked recently at water taps with meters built in, the thinking being the ’speedometer’ approach to shaping users’ behaviour – making users aware of the scale/rate/level of some activity should cause them to adjust that behaviour.

A number of projects and initiatives also apply this approach to electricity use – one of the most explicitly ‘designerly’ being Wattson – but there are a variety of different approaches, a handful of which I’ve reviewed here.

Harry Ward: Orb Energy Monitor
Recent design graduate Harry Ward’s Orb energy monitor (above and below) is especially attractive: a toroidal inductor is clipped around the cable being measured, and transmits data wirelessly to the Orb itself, a hand-held unit which glows different colours depending on the power being drawn.

The display on the Orb could show the user the direct electricity cost and CO₂ emissions equivalent, as well as the actual power being used and cumulative energy (kWh) used over a period. Harry has applied for patents and is looking to license the design in order to get the Orb into production.

UPDATE (27.vii): The Orb Energy Monitor website is now online with more information, images and contact details.

Images courtesy of Harry Ward

Ambient Devices: Energy Joule
The Energy Joule / Home Joule from Ambient Devices of New York (found via Michael Jefferson’s blog) shares some similarities with Harry’s Orb, but addresses a different problem: demand response, rather than actual consumption reduction.

The Energy Joule is designed to remain in situ, plugged into a wall socket, and it glows different colours (red, yellow, green) according to the price of electricity at the time – the idea being to encourage users to shift discretionary electricity use to times when there is less demand, and help the electricity generators balance their loads (an increasing problem), in return for ‘rewards’. As part of a wireless network (the Ambient Infocast Network – this is getting closer to everyware), the unit also displays other information such as temperature, weather forecast, and so on – and it’s the community’s electricity usage which is generally intended to be displayed, rather than the individual user’s.

Image from Ambient Devices’ website

(Ambient Devices also have a product called the Energy Orb – no relation to Harry’s product above – a version of their general Orb specifically locked-in to displaying the same electricity price/demand level as the Energy Joule.)

Gustafsson & Gyllenswärd: Power Aware Cord
Stemming originally from the Static! project at Sweden’s Interactive Institute, the Power Aware Cord by Anton Gustafsson and Magnus Gyllenswärd, is illuminated proportionally to the power being drawn:

Take the use of an everyday iron. A microprocessor within the Power Aware Cord immediately detects and converts the amount of energy used to power the appliance into a phosphorous thread that glows. The modern blue light intensifies and diminishes relative to energy flow. Increase the temperature of the iron and the cable will instantly glow brighter.

The versatile cord can be built-in or connected to the modern electrical appliance both directly or in distribution board format. Turn the appliance on and the flow of energy lights up the cord with a decorative glow.

This is an interesting approach: it allows users to be immediately aware of the devices which are consuming power, perhaps on standby, and is visually distinctive enough to make it difficult to ignore. As with all these products, extra energy is used to power the monitoring and display (lighting, etc), but this amount is small compared with the amount that may be saved if users do adjust their behaviour significantly.

 
Images from Power Aware Cord website

Kieva Mussington: Energy Monitor Switch
Kieva Mussington, a product design graduate from the University of Brighton, has specifically addressed the problem of devices left on standby, with the Energy Monitor Switch:

This product concept helps reduce wasted electricity in the home caused by appliances that have inefficient standby modes by making users aware of how much energy they use. Further developments include a light switch and plug socket disabling device that will make it easier for the user to save electricity.

 
Details and images from the University’s 2007 design graduate directory

I’ve made the observation before on the blog that without undertstanding what being ‘on standby’ involves for many devices, a lot of users assume that because just that one red LED is lit, that’s all the power being used. Anything which can bust the myth by showing that significant power is still being used is very much worthwhile, although changing the way that standby modes operate would ultimately be preferable (I’m dubious about the moves to ban standby functions entirely, for reasons explained here).

But do these kinds of things actually work in reducing energy use?
Eric and Alex let me know about an ongoing research project by Jordan Fischer, Sarah Jones and John Kestner at the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago in which methods of making users aware of their energy use are tried out:

They wired up a house to constantly monitor energy consumption in real time to increase awareness… no one knows how users might respond unless the concepts are tried out and feedback is gathered. What my classmates found when they prototyped their system was that the housemates (who are concerned about sustainability if not acutely aware of their impact) ended up turning the system into a game. “How low can we get the number to go?” Not sure how such a game would work for long term behavior change yet, but who knows. If it’s fun, it might work.

Alex, a participant in one of the experiments, sheds some more light on the ‘game’ aspects:

One thing that I never expected was that I tried a couple of time to see not only how low we could get the number, but also how high. I am not sure either what the more long term effects of such a game might have been, but thinking back, as with these water meters, it is difficult to improve your consumption habits once the obvious sources of waste are eliminated. Or, if it is a game, are we trying to beat our own averages those of our friends or neighbors or some ideal rate? What are we to compare to, A Bill McDonough Zero Waste standard or incremental improvement?

It will be interesting to see the results of the project as it progresses – one intriguing aspect is the Watt Watchers trial [PDF link], where a network of light bulbs dims if too many are left on, and thus ‘coaches’ the user not to leave lights on unnecessarily:

All the light bulbs in a house have special collars that find each other via a mesh network and say whether they’re on or off. Then they all decide based on how many of them are on whether to dim to remind the occupant that too many things might be on.

Image from Watt Watchers summary [PDF]

Overall, there are some very interesting products and projects in this field of ‘making energy use visible’, and if it does have the potential to influence user behaviour significantly, more widespread adoption must be likely in the years ahead.

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), readers’ comments on both stories are as cynical as one would expect: depending on how the system is implemented, it could also prevent the owner of a device from buying a non-Apple-authorised replacement (or spare) charger, or from borrowing a friend’s charger, and in this sense it could simply be another way of creating a proprietary lock-in, another way to ‘charge’ the customer, as it were.

It also looks as though it would play havoc with clever homebrew charging systems such as Limor Fried’s Minty Boost (incidentally the subject of a recent airline security débâcle) and similar commercial alternatives such as Mayhem’s Anycharge, although these are already defeated by a few devices which require special drivers to allow charging.

Reading Apple’s patent application, what is claimed is fairly broad with regard to the criteria for deciding whether or not re-charging should be allowed – in addition to charger-identification-based methods (i.e. the device queries the charger for a unique ID, or the charger provides it, perhaps modulated with the charging waveform) there are methods involving authentication based on a code provided to the original purchaser (when you plug in a charger the device has never ’seen’ before, it asks you for a security code to prove that you are a legitimate user), remote disabling via connection to a server, or even geographically-based disabling (using GPS: if the device goes outside of a certain area, the charging function will be disabled).

All in all, this seems an odd patent. Apple’s (patent attorneys’) rather hyperbolic statement (Description, 0018) that:

These devices (e.g., portable electronic devices, mechanical toys) are generally valuable and/or may contain valuable data. Unfortunately, theft of more popular electronic devices such as the Apple iPod music-player has become a serious problem. In a few reported cases, owners of the Apple iPod themselves have been seriously injured or even murdered.

…is no doubt true to some extent, but if the desire is really to make a stolen iPod worthless, then I would have expected Apple to lock each device in total to a single user – not even allowing it to be powered up without authentication. Just applying the authentication to the charging method seems rather arbitrary. (It’s also interesting to see the description of “valuable data”: surely in the case that Apple is aware that a device has been stolen, it could provide the legitimate owner of the device with all his or her iTunes music again, since the marginal copying cost is zero. And if the stolen device no longer functions, the RIAA need not panic about ‘unauthorised’ copies existing! But I doubt that’s even entered into any of the thinking around this.)

Whether or not the motives of discouraging theft are honourable or worthwhile, there is the potential for this sort of measure to cause signficant inconvenience and frustration for users (and second-hand buyers, for example – if the device doesn’t come with the original charger or the authentication code) along with incurring extra costs, for little real ‘theft deterrent’ benefit. How long before the ’security’ system is cracked? A couple of months after the device is released? At that point it will be worth stealing new iPods again.

(Many thanks to Michael O’Donnell of PDD for letting me know about this!)

Previously on the blog: Friend or foe? Battery authentication ICs

UPDATE: Freedom to Tinker has now picked up this story too, with some interesting commentary.

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.