Design with Intent

Incompati-babel

By Dan Lockton ⋅ January 21, 2007 ⋅ 2 comments

A clever comment on incompatible (and DRM’d) formats by eboy’s flunters. (Via rss.euge.de)

Some links

By Dan Lockton ⋅ January 17, 2007 ⋅ 2 comments

First, an apology for anyone who’s had problems with the RSS/Atom feeds over the last month or so. I think they’re fixed now (certainly Bloglines has started picking them up again) but please let me know if you don’t read this. Oops, that won’t work… anyway:
‘Gadgets as Tyrants’ by Xeni Jardin, looks at digital architectures [...]

Digital control round-up

By Dan Lockton ⋅ December 30, 2006 ⋅ One comment

Some developments in – and commentary on – digital architectures of control to end 2006:
Peter Gutmann’s ‘A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection’ (via Bruce Schneier) looks very lucidly at the effects that Vista’s DRM and measures to ‘protect’ content will have – on users themselves, and knock-on effects elsewhere. The more one reads, [...]

Teaching customers a lesson

By Dan Lockton ⋅ November 12, 2006 ⋅ 6 comments

Seth Godin talks about companies that try to teach their customers a lesson:
“Either you’re going to make someone happy or you’re not…
Here’s the short version: If you try to teach a customer a lesson, you’ve just done two things:
a. failed at teaching a lesson
and
b. lost a customer”
How does this relate to the “stick” approach to [...]

The secret

By Dan Lockton ⋅ October 31, 2006 ⋅ 6 comments

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

Mostly a mistake, partly a psychological experiment

By Dan Lockton ⋅ October 2, 2006 ⋅ Post a comment

Scott Carpenter of Moving To Freedom is (I think) the first person to comment on the fact that for the last 11 months, every time someone posts a comment on this blog, he or she has been redirected to www.danlockton.co.uk (my homepage) rather than returned to the actual post in question:

Uninnovate – engineering products to do less

By Dan Lockton ⋅ September 10, 2006 ⋅ Post a comment

Image from uninnovate.com
I’ve just come across a very interesting new blog, uninnovate.com, which focuses on the phenomenon of “engineering expensive features into a product for which there is no market demand in order to make the product do less.” The first few posts tackle ‘Three legends of uninnovation‘ (the iPod’s copy restrictions, Sony’s mp3-less Walkman, [...]

Some links: miscellaneous, pertinent to architectures of control

By Dan Lockton ⋅ September 1, 2006 ⋅ Post a comment

Ulises Mejias on ‘Confinement, Education and the Control Society’ – fascinating commentary on Deleuze’s societies of control and how the instant communication and ‘life-long learning’ potential (and, I guess, everyware) of the internet age may facilitate control and repression:
“This is the paradox of social media that has been bothering me lately: an ‘empowering’ media that [...]

The Privacy Ceiling

By Dan Lockton ⋅ August 22, 2006 ⋅ One comment

Scott Craver of the University of Binghamton has a very interesting post summarising the concept of a ‘privacy ceiling’:
“This is an economic limit on privacy violation by companies, owing to the liability of having too much information about (or control over) users.”
It’s the “control over users” that immediately makes this something especially relevant for [...]

Use of RFID in DRM