The news that tobacco companies have increased the levels of nicotine in their brands over the last few years – especially those popular with certain groups – made me think further about architectures of control:

“The amount of nicotine in most cigarettes rose an average of almost 10 percent from 1998 to 2004, with brands most popular with young people and minorities registering the biggest increases and highest nicotine content… the higher levels theoretically could make new smokers more easily addicted and make it harder for established smokers to quit.

…

Boxes of Doral lights, a low-tar brand made by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., had the biggest increase in yield, 36 percent… The nicotine in Marlboro products, preferred by two-thirds of high school smokers, increased 12 percent. Kool lights increased 30 percent. Two-thirds of African American smokers use menthol brands.

…

“The reports are stunning,” said Matthew L. Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. “What’s critical is the consistency of the increase, which leads to the conclusion that it has to have been conscious and deliberate.”"

The classification ‘architectures of control‘ ought rightly to include cigarettes alongside any other product designed to be addictive or to reinforce patterns of users’ behaviour. In this sense, any psychoactive drug intended to control/alter users’ behaviour must be considered part of the same phenomenon, certainly when it is created or administered with that specific intention. And of course, these are not just designed to be unpleasant, but designed to injure and endanger life (not until revenue’s been extracted, of course).

It may seem extreme or inappropriate to link, say, the razor-blade business model with drug addiction (just as it perhaps seemed extreme to put biscuit packaging alongside Henry Porter’s ‘Blair Laid Bare’), but there are definite parallels. A product is designed with a feature which intentionally locks customers into that product, through making it difficult to switch (for cost reasons, by ingraining habits, or by actual chemical or mental addiction). In the cases of, say, printer cartridges or razor blades, the original products (the printer or razor) require frequent refills/replacement parts. In the case of cigarette addiction, the initial use of the product (the cigarettes) modifies the behaviour of the host (the smoker) so that continued purchases of the products are required.

In fact, is this not a parasitic lock-in business model? How different is a product which deliberately causes addiction to, say, a piece of malware which takes over a user’s computer and installs unwanted software, or advertising pop-ups, or, say, phones home regularly and has the potential to hold the user’s data to ransom?

From the point of view of educating the wider public (including designers), the cigarette/drug addiction comparison is a good way of immediately highlighting the issue of ‘product rights management‘ as an architecture of control.*

(Washington Post link via A Blog Around the Clock and BoingBoing)

*Wish I’d thought of it at last Sunday’s Copyfighters’ event!

From the Sunday Times, ‘Standby buttons face axe to curb energy waste’:

“Ministers want to do away with the standby buttons that allow [users] to flick their TVs and other electronic gadgets on and off while moving barely a muscle…

Figures… show that gadgets left unnecessarily on standby or connected to chargers squander electricity worth £740m each year and are responsible for 4m tonnes of excess carbon dioxide emissions each year.

The biggest culprits are not televisions but stereo systems, responsible for £290m of wasted energy, followed by video recorders, £175m, televisions, £88m, games consoles, £70m, computer monitors, £41m, DVD players, £19m, and set-top boxes, £11m. Mobile phone chargers left plugged in unnecessarily waste £47m of electricity each year, enough to supply 66,000 homes.

The government has rejected one proposal, from the energy company Scottish Power, that standby buttons on existing electrical products be removed or disabled. But it will work with manufacturers to ‘design out’ standby buttons from new products… One likely recommendation for some products is that they be designed to switch themselves off.”

This seems a fairly sensible application of control within the design process, with the ‘feature deletion’ being done to fulfil socially beneficial intentions rather than purely commercial ones. The less energy devices use, the less money the customer spends on electricity, as well as reducing the environmental impact.

Nevertheless, there are millions of people for whom a standby button is a very useful – or even essential – design feature. If you’re confined to bed, or a static chair for most of your day, whether through disability, long-term illness or simply age, that remote control button (on the TV, radio or even the room lighting) is a godsend. One would hope that from an inclusive design point of view, there will still be such devices available, and – if I’m honest – I think they should still be available to everybody, if desired. There should be no need to ‘prove’ disability in order to buy a TV with a remote control standby function.

An alternative is, of course, a remote control/standby system that doesn’t use anywhere near so much power when the device is on standby. A clever range of current-limiting gang sockets are already available which detect the amount of current a device actually needs to draw when on standby, and limits that which it can draw to precisely that. Alternatively, we might design products so the ‘standby’ signal from the remote control is intercepted by an entirely separate, DC circuit, maybe battery-powered and drawing a minuscule current, which then switches the mains on and off using a relay when required.

The government proposals are – on the face of it – largely a rare case of a ‘win-win’ architecture of control (see diagram), though of course we need to consider the effects of the manufacture and distribution of so many millions more products (and probably, the disposal of the old ones). If we argue that this would have happened anyway (which is surely true) then the effect will be better than if the replacement devices had no environmental considerations going into their design, but this is the kind of situation where a full life-cycle analysis would be very useful.

See also Case study: Optimum lifetime products.

A lot of people find this site through searching for something along the lines of ‘Mosquito high frequency anti-teenager ringtone’, and are presumably disappointed when they find that there is no such ringtone to download, even if just because they’d like to test it on friends and family. (More on the Mosquito device) There’s also the more possibility of course of using the ringtone as a kind of ‘secret ringtone’ that, supposedly, only younger people can hear, so you can receive text messages, etc, e.g. while in class, without adults noticing, though I’d have thought that was partially the point of the vibrate mode.

Anyway, I thought I might as well give those searching what they’re looking for, sort of.

EDIT (31.v.2006) : I’ve got rid of the mp3s, because even encoded with the LAME ‘insane’ (320kbps) preset, the sound was too different from the purer tone of the wave files. The whole point about mp3 as a lossy compression format is that it reduces the percentage of high frequencies that are (normally) less audible to humans: i.e., the high frequencies which are the whole point of this exercise are given much lower weighting.

30 second, 2.6 Mb wave files (produced using Audacity) are now available again, hosted at the Internet Archive (thanks for the tip, Andreas):

The above three files are hereby placed in the public domain.

Here too is a link to a BBC page where you can hear (and download) a 256kbps mp3 of the actual Mosquito sound – www.bbc.co.uk/wiltshire/…shtml.

I suppose MIDI files of the tones would be better: if anyone can supply these, this would be great.

Equally, I don’t know if the speakers in a typical mobile phone are set up to respond to frequencies in this range properly, so it may be that even the wave files will be useless when played using a phone.

Note: I’m only 23, but none of the above sound files sounds especially irritating to me (though my sound card and speakers may not be giving me the full effect that the Mosquito device itself would. I can hear the 20 kHz fine and it certainly wouldn’t drive me away: it’s similar to the hum an older TV or CRT might make.

EDIT (15.vi.2006 am) : This post is now fifth result in Google (UK) for ringtone download – wow! If only a few people would click on some of the ads, I might actually make a few quid…

EDIT (15.vi.2006 pm) : Wow, that dropped out quickly! By this afternoon the site wasn’t even in the first 10 pages of results…

Transfer has an amazing collection of images of ‘Anti-Sit’ devices, mostly in New York but also internationally.

Taking a look through the photos, it’s clear that only in a very few cases (the air-conditioning units and standpipes, for example) are there real ‘functional’ reasons for preventing people sitting down on them, i.e. to prevent possible damage. In most of the examples, the spikes or jagged edges appear to have been put there purely as social engineering: these are public spaces and yet the public is being subjected to an architecture of control which says “You can’t sit (or lie) down here and rest. Move on.” Indeed, it’s almost as if someone despises the public, or at least those members of it who want – or need – to sit down.

Nail-type spikes are common in many towns here in the UK to prevent pigeons or other birds perching on particular ledges or window sills, particularly on higher level features that would be difficult to clean, but I don’t think we (yet) commonly have the degree of anti-sit architectures of control shown in the Transfer examples – though I might be wrong!

As some of the comments note, the possibility of someone tripping or falling onto some of these spikes, and being seriously injury (and litigious) is surely something to consider? Car bonnet mascots have been outlawed due to the possibility of injury to pedestrians, and yet councils and building owners are allowed to fit far more dangerous devices such as these spikes, which are specifically designed to injure pedestrians who aren’t warned off by their appearance.

Thanks to Deborah for letting me know!

Images from Transfer: The Anti-Sit Archives