Tim Holley’s Tio project, developed in response to a brief by Onzo, and described as ‘A Light Switch to Help Children Save Energy’ – deservedly won the HSBC Sustainability Prize at the Made in Brunel show:

“Children play a key role in reducing energy consumption due to the fact that they will be among the key decision-makers in the next 30 years. A simple way to engage and educate them is to concentrate on lighting, which accounts for up to 15% of electricity use in the home. The target market for Tio is 7-11 year-olds. This coincides with a period in primary education during which children begin to learn about the environment, energy and the effects that humans are having on the world. Tio [...]allow[s] children to demonstrate their knowledge of energy conservation to their family and encourage their role as ‘energy champions’ of the home. Tio has the potential to reduce lighting-use by up to 25%, resulting in an energy saving of up to 11% over a five year period…

The wall-mounted light switch[...] controls the lighting in the child’s room. Tio is soft and tactile, thus encourages user interaction. The character of ‘Tio’ displayed on the light switch encourages children to turn their lights off: Tio is happy when the lights have only been on for a short period of time. The longer they are left on, the angrier he becomes. This acts as an emotional reminder to turn the lights off…

The recommended ‘lights-on time’ is influenced by the child’s age, their daily activities and the time of day. [...] Information (‘lights-on’ time) is sent wirelessly from the wall switch to a computer. The computer programme allows the child to track their lighting-use performance over an extended period of time. The child takes care of a ‘virtual tree’ by moderating their lighting-use performance. This engages children to make a personal contribution to reducing energy consumption.”

There are some clever ideas in there, including pester-power (“Make sure your parents turn off their lights too”) and, from a Design with Intent toolkit point of view, some of the patterns you might be able to identify include affective engagement, self-monitoring, material properties and metaphors. There’s some neat product detailing too, such as the way Tio’s expressions are formed by different patterns of LEDs being illuminated under the translucent case.

Tim was a very useful and insightful tester of an earlier version of the Design with Intent toolkit back in autumn 2008 (as part of the pilot study reported in this co-authored paper [direct PDF link]) so it’s great to see his project get such recognition. He’s now working for Onzo in product R&D strategy and has some exciting and ambitious plans for the future: as a very talented young designer bringing together creative user-centred design and technology expertise with an eye for business strategy, I’m sure Tim will go far.

Across London at Goldsmiths, Alexander Kirchmann’s ‘Lehman’s Inheritance’ project aims “to create and design products, that can help an individual to manage the [economic] crisis” such as this pint glass with cost markings (right). As Alexander puts it, “my products are the inheritance of the crash… By exposing people to their spending and also to their earnings my design is saving the owner money.”

This is an incredibly simple project (at least the example that’s illustrated – I’d be interested to know what other products Alexander modified / created). But the impact of exposing costs in this way – self-monitoring without any special equipment – could be very effective. In some of the recent workshops I’ve run with designers and students, similarly low-tech feedback concepts have been suggested for problems such as reducing water wastage (sinks with scales marked on them) and reducing overfilling of electric kettles.

More projects coming up in Part 3.

Images from the websites linked.

I’m sure I’m not the first person to point this out, but most of our civilisation seems to rely on the idea that “someone else will sort it out”, whether that’s providing us with food or energy or money or justice or a sense of pride or a world for our grandchildren to live in. We pay the politicians who are best at lying to us because we don’t want to have to think about problems. We bail out banks in one enormous spasm of cognitive dissonance. We pay ‘those scientists’ to solve things for us and them hate them when they tell us we need to change what we’re doing. We pay for new things because we can’t fix the old ones and then our children pay for the waste.

Economically, ecologically, ethically, we have mortgaged the planet. We’ve mortgaged our future in order to get what we have now, but the debt doesn’t die with us. On this model, the future is one vast pyramid scheme stretching out of sight. We’ve outsourced functions we don’t even realise we don’t need to people and organisations of whom we have no understanding. Worse, we’ve outsourced the functions we do need too, and we can’t tell the difference.

Maybe that’s just being human. But so is learning and tool-making. We must be able to do better than we are. John R. Ehrenfeld’s Sustainability by Design, which I’m reading at present, explores the idea that reducing unsustainability will not create sustainability, which ought to be pretty fundamental to how we think about these issues: going more slowly towards the cliff edge does not mean changing direction.

I’m especially inspired by Tim O’Reilly’s “Work on stuff that matters” advice. If we go back to the ‘most things are unnecessary’ idea, the plan must be to work on things that are really useful, that will really advance things. There is little excuse for not trying to do something useful. It sounds ruthless, and it does have the risk of immediately putting us on the defensive (“I am doing something that matters…”).

The idea I can’t get out of my head is that if we took more responsibility for things (i.e. progressively stopped outsourcing everything to others as in paragraphs 2 and 3 above, and actively learned how to do them ourselves), this would make a massive difference in the long run. We’d be independent from those future generations we’re currently recruiting into our pyramid scheme before they even know about it. We’d all of us be empowered to understand and participate and create and make and generate a world where we have perspicacity, where we can perceive the affordances that different options will give us in future and make useful decisions based on an appreciation of the longer term impacts.

An large part of it is being able to understand consequences and implications of our actions and how we are affected, and in turn affect, the situations we’re in – people around us, the environment, the wider world. Where does this water I’m wasting come from? Where does it go? How much does Google know about me? Why? How does a bank make its money? How can I influence a new law? What do all those civil servants do? How was my food produced? Why is public transport so expensive? Would I be able to survive if X or Y happened? Why not? What things that I do everyday are wasteful of my time and money? How much is the purchase of item Z going to cost me over the next year? What will happen when it breaks? Can I fix it? Why not? And so on.

You might think we need more transparency of the power structures and infrastructures around us – and we do – but I prefer to think of the solution as being tooling us up in parallel: we need to have the ability to understand what we can see inside, and focus on what’s actually useful/necessary and what isn’t. Our attention is valuable and we mustn’t waste it.

How can all that be taught?

I remember writing down as a teenager, in some lesson or other, “What we need is a school subject called How and why things are, and how they operate.” Now, that’s broad enough that probably all existing academic subjects would lay claim to part of it. So maybe I’m really calling for a higher overall standard of education.

But the devices and systems we encounter in everyday life, the structures around us, can also help, by being designed to show us (and each other) what they’re doing, whether that’s ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (or perhaps ‘useful’ or not), and what we can do to improve their performance. And by influencing the way we use them, whether nudging, persuading or preventing us getting it wrong in the first place, we can learn as we use. Everyday life can be a constructionist learning process.

This all feeds into the idea of ‘Design for Independence’:

Reducing society’s resource dependence
Reducing vulnerable users’ dependence on other people
Reducing users’ dependence on ‘experts’ to understand and modify the technology they own.

One day I’ll develop this further as an idea – it’s along the lines of Victor Papanek and Buckminster Fuller – but there’s a lot of other work to do first. I hope it’s stuff that matters.

Dan Lockton

Then, when it came to ‘revision time’, I’d spend maybe a couple of days simply sorting through this (on the face of it) nightmare morass of notes, because I had to: they were useless otherwise (yes, a useful landmine strategy). And that act, of sorting out the hundreds of pages into coherent taxonomies, subjects and themes, imposing boundaries and ascertaining relationships, was not only like playing back the salient parts of dozens of lectures in rapid succession, but also forced me to read the notes: I had to, to work out how to file them. I had to work out what I’d meant when I wrote some gobbledygook. It made me think about it all again, reinforce what information I’d already retained, and add the rest – there was a lot of subjectivity in terms of what aspects I’d noted in the first place, of course. When it then came to the real ‘revising’, once the papers were organised, I had retained much more of it than I would have done otherwise, and was very much aware of what areas I didn’t understand: which bits needed further work, and so on. It worked: it really did. It was useless when someone said “do you mind if I borrow your notes?” but from my point of view, I felt totally immersed when revising. It had the right mixture of challenge and ability. It was great.

Anyway, the point of all that is that to some extent I’ve been looking forward to getting round to writing about some of these talks and events, and the delay has had a certain kind of pleasant anticipation about it. The reports will be based on notes that are, while no longer as eccentrically formatted as they once would have been, subject to a fair degree of personal interpretation. And the things that have stuck in my mind in the interim – what’s stayed with me about a particular talk in the intervening months without referring to those notes – will inevitably be fairly well reinforced by now.

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.

Certainly when I was deciding whether a not a PhD was the ‘right’ thing to do after a couple of years of pretty diverse peripatetic freelancing, the efforts of other bloggers – especially this article by Tom Coates (and the appended comments) – and Rich Watts’ blog, were very helpful and gave me some great, and sometimes sobering, insights. More recently, these posts by the polymathic Nicolas Nova and Julian Bleecker have given well-justified discourse on moving on from academia, even more pertinent because of their design/art-technology emphasis. (The ‘disciplinarity boundaries’ issue, which vexes me so much, has been addressed in this context by Julian more than once; Roberto Greco has a comprehensive review of more thinking on this issue, too).

Anyway, here’s (mildly edited to remove some commercial and personal information) the report I prepared, rather hurriedly, on what’s been accomplished in the first year, and what’s still to come:

Dan Lockton, Cleaner Electronics Research Group
Start date: September 2007
Design for Sustainable Behaviour
Review, end of Year 1, August 2008

Summary: Design can be used to influence users’ behaviour.

By applying techniques from a variety of fields, it’s possible to design systems which help users to reduce the environmental impact of using them: effectively, making users more efficient by designing for behaviour change.

This project aims to develop and test a method for assisting designers to create behaviour-changing products and services in this area, and then run user trials with prototypes, to determine which approaches are actually most effective at changing users’ behaviour, and reducing energy or other resource use.

Background

As part of my Master’s degree, I researched the concept of architectures of control, ways in which systems have been designed to influence users to interact with them in certain ways, often coercively, to match political or corporate agendas [1]. Subsequently, alongside working as a freelance designer/engineer/researcher, I continued to develop this research independently, primarily via a blog [2] which has gained a fairly diverse audience across the design, technology, media and social science fields.

The scope gradually broadened, becoming more positive in the process, to encompass what I’ve since termed design with intent – strategic design intended to influence user behaviour, including helping users achieve their own goals as well as those of society. This last point is important, since many social problems – particularly environmental ones – can be seen as a result of user behaviour.

It was with this background that I discussed the possibility of a PhD investigating ‘Reducing the environmental impact of products by using design to change user behaviour’ (or, more succinctly, design for sustainable behaviour) with David Harrison, and was pleased to return to Brunel Design as part of the Cleaner Electronics Research Group, with funding from the Ormsby Trust, in September 2007.

Research phase 1a: Literature and practice review

The first phase of the PhD involved investigating, comparing and characterising ‘design with intent’ techniques via examples from a wide range of fields, including human-computer interaction, manufacturing engineering and urban planning as well as product design.

Many practitioners and theorists have touched on aspects of this area from different directions without describing its full extent, and indeed, to understand this, I’ve had to acquire at least some working knowledge of concepts from a wide range of disciplines, including architecture, ecological and social psychology, behavioural economics, human-computer interaction, communication studies, science & technology studies, rhetoric, information architecture, semiotics, security engineering and quality management, alongside a deeper education in the principles of interaction design and ergonomics, to which I’d only tangentially been exposed as an undergraduate design student.

The output of this phase of the research was the paper ‘Design with Intent: Persuasive Technology in a wider context’ [3] (see below).

Research phase 1b: Initial development of the Design with Intent method

The intention of the review of techniques is to enable the development of a ‘suggestion engine’ –the Design with Intent method – for designers working in sustainable and environmentally sensitive design, integrating ideas from different fields to assist the selection and application of design techniques which influence user behaviour. The method itself can be applied to many social problems in which the design of systems (products, services, environments) affects user behaviour, but the focus of the testing will be (at least for this PhD!) on applying it to issues where user behaviour, particularly with energy-using products, affects the environment significantly.

The reasoning behind this, and discussion of its applicability to environmental problems, resulted in the paper ‘Making the user more efficient: Design for Sustainable Behaviour’ [4] (see below).

The approach taken is that certain target behaviours can be identified, and described in the abstract, with different design techniques being applicable to each one. A user behaviour ‘problem’ described in terms of one or more of the target behaviours will, using the suggestion engine, result in the designer being presented with a number of relevant techniques, with examples of each technique being applied in different contexts.

The initial development produced a rather TRIZ-like method, using a tree structure to match target behaviours to relevant design techniques, and my own paper-based run-throughs indicate that it seems to work in terms of generating new design ideas. This is described briefly in the poster I presented at Brunel’s ReSCon [5].

Research phase 2: Testing and refinement of the Design with Intent method (current)

The aim of testing the method is to determine: a) to what extent it is useful to designers addressing user behaviour problems in sustainable design; and b) how the method can be improved. In terms of a), the comparison is with an unstructured brainstorming-type method: does the Design with Intent method offer anything beyond this? Would it perhaps be better implemented as a reference book, a ‘design for sustainable behaviour manual’, rather than a ‘suggestion engine’?

As a precursor to practical testing, in July 2008 I explained and ran through the tree-structure method with two directors and the studio manager of Live|Work [6], a major service design consultancy in London specialising in socially beneficial design solutions for both public- and private-sector clients. The feedback – from exactly the kind of designers I envisage being the ultimate users of the method – was extremely useful, and resulted in a significant redesign of the way the method is presented, moving from a tree structure to a series of concentric rings which allow easier creative exploration of ‘related’ design techniques and target behaviours. This redesigned method, along with some revised (simplified) terminology, is what will be tested.

The testing programme is intended to involve both design students and design consultancies: this is the best way of assessing its usefulness both to existing designers in the context of commercial constraints, and the next generation of designers in an academic setting. The method will be refined as a result of the testing.

First, a pilot study is being arranged with individual design students/recent graduates, using a think-aloud protocol, with all guidance and assistance recorded, primarily to identify points that need clarification or potential problems that may arise. The plan for this study is being written at present (August 2008) and, subject to approval, should be reasonably quick to undertake.

The full study will take the form of workshop sessions in the Autumn term, probably with Level 3 Design students. Participants will be introduced to the method, and, in separate groups, assigned ‘sustainable user behaviour’ problems, with the method there to guide them in generating solutions. (The control will not have the method.) The group interactions and creative process will be recorded and assessed, as will all the output; the specifics of this study have not yet been decided.

A possibility has also arisen to apply the method to one of a consultancy’s client projects, in due course, which has significant potential for testing the method’s worth under more market-based constraints, in a real design consultancy. Other consultancies will also be approached.

Research phase 3: Application of the method

The usefulness of the method will best be tested by the quality of the concepts it generates, so the aim of this phase of the research is to build (prototype) and run user trials comparing products developed by applying the method to a particular problem (users overfilling kettles is a favourite, but there are many possibilities).

This will allow quantitative assessment of the actual energy used by different products, by representative users, in use, over a period, to provide some information about the effectiveness of different techniques in that context, as well as qualitative feedback on usability and other issues. This information can then be used to refine the method further, so that, for example, details of the relative effectiveness of different techniques can be incorporated.

Contributions to knowledge

The project will address these questions, reformulated as appropriate:

• How can users’ behaviour be changed, through redesign of systems, to reduce environmental impact?
• How significant are the impact reductions, and what technology and human factors issues affect the implementations?

It’s hoped that the process of investigating and answering these questions, will constitute an original, distinct and useful contribution to knowledge, and that the Design with Intent method — however it evolves — will prove useful to designers working in the field of behaviour change in society in general. Since the ‘suggestion engine’ of the method is effectively an ‘innovation engine’, it is envisaged that worthwhile intellectual property may also result.

Research output and academic development

Two papers (one journal article, one published conference paper) have so far resulted from the research, and thanks primarily to visitors from the blog, have achieved significant visibility on BURA (top paper and 3rd highest number of views in June, and still currently the highest average views per author):

Lockton, D., Harrison, D.J., Stanton, N.A. ‘Making the user more efficient: Design for sustainable behaviour’. International Journal of Sustainable Engineering Vol.1 No. 1, pp. 3-8, March 2008 [3]

Lockton, D., Harrison, D.J., Stanton, N.A. ‘Design With Intent: Persuasive Technology in a Wider Context’. in H. Oinas-Kukkonen et al. (Eds.): Persuasive 2008, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 5033, pp. 274-278, Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2008 [4]

As a result of the IJSE paper, I was asked to become a reviewer for the journal and have so far reviewed one submission.

I have presented at two external conferences, Persuasive 2008: The Third International Conference on Persuasive Technology, in Oulu, Finland, in June, the costs of which were partially funded by receiving a Vice-Chancellor’s Travel Prize (presentation: ‘Design with Intent: Persuasive Technology in a wider context’ [7]) and New Sciences of Protection: Designing Safe Living at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Lancaster University, in July (presentation: ‘Design with Intent: behaviour-shaping through design’ [8]). I also presented a poster [5] at Brunel’s ReSCon (and the Graduate School poster competition) which provided a good opportunity to try explaining the research to more engineering-focused visitors, and has (I hope) helped me understand how to improve the clarity needed to present research in poster form.

The invitation to present at Lancaster came as one of the organisers has been following the research via my blog; it’s hoped that this kind of visibility can help even further as the research progresses. At present I have an invitation to present at Design|Behaviour: Making it Happen at Loughborough in October.

I also attended a doctoral consortium organised by the Universities of Oulu (Finland) and Aalborg (Denmark) prior to the Persuasive conference, and the networking and discussion with other researchers working in similar areas of design, computer science and psychology were extremely useful and have dramatically expanded and sharpened the focus of my thinking. I now have contacts at a number of institutions and companies internationally who are interested in the research and some of whom may be, in time, potential collaborators. During the year I’ve tried hard to attend and participate in as many relevant events as possible, both to meet other researchers involved in related fields, and to learn more about how academia and practising designers work together – a partial list:

• Anthrodesign & UX Meetup, London, Sept 2007
• BSI Manufacture, Assembly, Disassembly, and End-of-life Processing standards meeting, Sept 2007
• EPSRC Network on Product Life Spans seminar, Sheffield Hallam, Sept 2007, with Alex Plant
• Sustainable Design Network seminar ‘Envisioning a Sustainable Future’, Nottingham, Dec 2007
• Meeting at University of Bath with Dr Elies Dekoninck and Ed Elias to discuss similar research areas, June 2008
• Attended meeting with Staffan Davidsson (Volvo Cars), Dr Mark Young and Stewart Birrell, June 2008
• Interviewed by Jamie Young (Imperial College) for behavioural change policy research, July 2008
• OpenTech open innovation & technology conference, London, July 2008
• The Affective in Sustainable Design, seminar, Central St Martins, July 2008
• RSA lecture by Richard Thaler, author of Nudge, London, July 2008

At Brunel, I also gave a seminar in June 2008 as preparation for presenting in Finland, and received some very useful feedback.

In terms of parallel activities at Brunel, as well as the Graduate School and SED induction training modules, I’ve completed the Graduate Training Assistant training, and the Graduate School’s Entrepreneurship Masterclass, and have helped assess Level 3 Environmentally Sensitive Design group projects. During the Spring term I assisted with the weekly Level 2 Electronics labs and also marked some of the final assignments, which has given me a good insight into how all this works. I’d welcome the opportunity to be involved further with Design teaching in the next couple of years.

I am excited and enthusiastic about the years ahead, and the opportunities they present, and would like to thank everyone who’s helped me so far.

[1] Available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=908493
[2] Architectures of Control / Design with Intent blog: http://danlockton.co.uk
[3] Available at http://hdl.handle.net/2438/2138
[4] Available at http://hdl.handle.net/2438/2137
[5] Available at http://danlockton.co.uk/research/poster_DL.ai.pdf
[6] Live|Work website: http://www.livework.co.uk
[7] Available at http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/2008/06/09/design-with-intent-presentation-slide/
[8] Not yet available online

I passed the review OK, but it was made clear that I really ought to have a more formal, critical literature review, at least in draft, done by now, pertinent to the actual intended contributions to knowledge, and explaining the ‘hole’ in current knowledge and previous work that I’m aiming to fill. Of course, I’ve done plenty of reviewing what’s out there, but given the amount of new avenues and relevant theories I seem to come across weekly, it’s been difficult to draw it all together coherently, and I’ll admit I’ve been putting it off. Perhaps now it’s time to do it properly, along with a ‘contents page’ for the thesis, alongside organising the pilot studies of the DwI method (more on which on the blog in the near future). Yes, deciding what to leave out is going to be hard, but that’s part of the point.

Thanks again to everyone who’s helped this year: having the collective experience of hundreds of intelligent blog readers from many disciplines to draw on and inspire the research has really made the whole thing so much more dynamic, somehow.

It’s this:
The set of things/ideas/concepts/relationships/solutions/sets that have been named/defined is much, much, much smaller than the set of actual things/ideas/concepts/relationships/solutions/sets.

And yet without a name or definition for what you’re researching, you’ll find it difficult to research it, or at least to tell anyone what you’re doing. The set of things we can comprehend researching is thus limited to what we’ve already defined.

How do we ever advance, then? Are we not just forever sub-dividing the same limited field with which we’re already familiar? Or am I missing something? Is this a kind of (obvious) generalisation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?

Relating it to my current research, as I ought to, the problems of choice architecture, defaults, framing, designed-in perceived affordances and so on are clearly special cases of the idea: the decision options people perceive as available to them can be, and are, used strategically to limit what decisions people make and how they understand things (e.g. Orwell’s Newspeak). But whether it’s done deliberately or not, the problem exists anyway.

Your [Chris Vallance's] generation really understood the computers, and today’s generation know they’re just a tool, and don’t really get to grips with them… When I was starting in business, and when I was a child, electronics was a huge hobby, and you could buy components on the street and make all sort of things, and people did. But that also has all passed; it’s almost forgotten.

It’s true, of course, that there are still plenty of hobbyist-makers out there, including in disciplines that just weren’t open before, and if anything, initiatives such as Make and Instructables – and indeed the whole free software and open source movements – have helped raise the profile of making, hacking, modding and other democratic innovation. It’s no secret that Clive himself is a proponent of Linux and open source in general for future low-cost computing, as is mentioned briefly in the interview, and the impact of the ZX series in children’s bedrooms (together with BBC Micros at school) was, to some extent, a fantastic constructionist success for a generation in Britain.

But is Clive right? How many schoolkids nowadays make their own radios or burglar alarms or write their own games? When they do, is it a result of enlightened parents or self-directed inquisitiveness? Or are we guilty of applying our own measures of ‘engagement’ with technology? After all, you’re reading something published using WordPress, which was started by a teenager. Personally, I’m extremely optimistic that the future will lead to much greater technological democratisation, and hope to work, wherever possible, to contribute to achieving that.

I’ve worked for Clive, as a designer/engineer, on and off, for a number of years, and it’s pleasing to have an intelligent media interview with him that doesn’t simply regurgitate and chortle over the C5, but instead tries to tap his vision and thoughts on technical society and its future.

Silicon Dreams

Incidentally, Clive’s 1984 speech to the US Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future, mentioned in the interview, is extremely interesting – quite apart from the almost Randian style of some of it – as much as for the mixture of what we might now see as mundanities among the far-sighted vision as for the prophetic clarity, with talk of guided 200mph maglev cars and the colonisation of the galaxy alongside the development of a cellular phone network and companion robots for the elderly. Of course, the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.

Talk of information technology may be misleading. It is true that one of the features of the coming years is a dramatic fall, perhaps by a factor of 100, in the cost of publishing as video disc technology replaces paper and this may be as significant as the invention of the written word and Caxton’s introduction of movable type.

Talk of information technology confuses an issue – it is used to mean people handling information rather than handling machines and there is little that is fundamental in this. The real revolution which is just starting is one of intelligence. Electronics is replacing man’s mind, just as steam replaced man’s muscle but the replacement of the slight intelligence employed on the production line is only the start.

And then there is this, which seems to predict electronic tagging of offenders:

Consider, for example, the imprisonment of offenders. Unless conducted with a biblical sense of retribution, this procedure attempts to reduce crime by deterrence and containment. It is, though, very expensive and the rate of recidivism lends little support to its curative properties.

Given a national telephone computer net such as I have described briefly, an alternative appears. Less than physically dangerous criminals could be fitted with tiny transporters so that their whereabouts, to a high degree of precision, could he monitored and recorded constantly. Should this raise fears of an Orwellian society we could offer miscreants the alternative of imprisonment. I am confident of the general preference.

But I digress. A lot of the fascination comes from seeing a different way to explain a concept to someone else: a structured, alternative form of learning or understanding a problem, which is, somehow, immensely satisfying. There’s always the glint of a possibility that if we could find different ways to explain difficult or complex subjects, more people might be able to understand and appreciate them.

Sarah Burwood, a graduating Industrial Design student showing her work at Made in Brunel this week, has created Tumble Sums, a ‘Child’s Mechanical Visual Calculator’:

Helping children understand fundamental mathematical principles, Tumble Sums is a calculating tool which visually shows a child how an answer is being reached. Calculations are solved in a physical way, based solely on mechanical operations. Tumble Sums focuses on an understanding of the way children think, their mathematical understanding and the psychology behind these aspects.

It looks to be beautifully machined from acrylic sections, and that height alone makes it extremely imposing. Imagine one of these at the back of every primary-school classroom!

This concept of making hidden processes visible in order to aid the construction of the user’s mental models is something that will, I think, be an important component of lots of more advanced interfaces in the years ahead, particularly in areas where, fundamentally, we’re bad at understanding the consequences of our actions (environment, health, finances). It’s maybe allied to constructionism, though by no means the same idea.

*Incidentally, the morning I first turned up at Brunel again as a PhD student, I sat in the wonderful garden John Crank had created, reading Vance Packard’s The Waste Makers, waiting for the doors to the building to be unlocked.

Now, this is not in the same league, but interesting nonetheless: a ‘game’ to teach children (4 years onwards) spelling using a poka-yoke technique. The Spellmaster, from J W Spear & Sons – the example here is from 1980 (the Enfield factory was closed after a Mattel takeover in 1994) featured eighty plastic letter tiles, Scrabble-like but larger, with raised pegs underneath, a different pattern for each letter.

The letter tiles are used to spell the names of objects and concepts (colours, numbers) illustrated on punched cards which fit onto a backing board, the tiles only fitting in their spaces correctly if the pegs pattern aligns perfectly with the punched holes. If the wrong letter is used, the tile doesn’t fit properly and sits at an angle rather than snapping neatly into place. The ‘snap’ of a correctly positioned letter is actually pretty satisfying – surprisingly so, given the combination of plastic (urea formaldehyde, I think) and 30-year old cardboard.

Left: The wrong tile – the pegs do not align with the punched holes. Right: The correct tile – everything lines up. Below: The wrong tile here – note the extra peg on the left-hand edge of the tile, which doesn’t match up with the punched hole, and leads to the tile not sitting down properly.

Letters which could work either way up, such as ‘o’ and ‘s’ have – as would be hoped – symmetrical peg patterns. It’s a simple system, but it’s clever and while not offering any ‘remedial’ function to the child, I would think it’s not too likely that many children would try all 25 other letters assuming the first one didn’t fit. Hence, there is some bias against pure trial-and-error. It’s interesting to think how immediately we might consider a computer-based solution to this kind of design brief today, where a purely physical one would work very well and give a different kind of tactile satisfaction.

Now that I’m a student again, I’ve got access (via Athens) to a vastly increased amount of academic journals, papers and so on. Far more than I could have done ‘legitimately’ without that Athens login, aside from travelling from library to library to library. And while it’s good for me to have that login, right at this moment, the necessity for such a login is hardly good for society as a whole. As an independent researcher, I simply could not keep on top of my subject properly.

I think it’s fairly clear that open access is the way to go, and certainly where research has enjoyed any degree of public funding there should be no case otherwise. But even where research is freely or easily available, its impact, as a result of limited exposure, is often also very limited or nonexistent, even within academia.

This is surely an omnipresent worry/headache/frustration for many researchers, and the issue was brought home to me the other day. I was reading a (fairly academic) book, published in the UK in 2005, written by a design professor at a university about 50 miles from here, and found a comment, within a discussion of a particular issue, along the lines of “no research has been done on the issue of to what extent A relates to B in the field of C, but it is safe to assume D” and yet, in front of me on the desk, was a PhD thesis completed in 2003, at my university, addressing not only the exact issue specified, but also showing D to be incorrect. Now, a paper was written based on this thesis, and published in an engineering journal, and also presented at a conference, but it clearly escaped the notice of the author of the book.

Now, of course, this probably happens a thousand times a day in academia. It’s not an especially interesting example, and there may be many possible explanations, the book maybe having taken a long period to go from being researched to publication being somewhat likely. But assuming it didn’t, and assuming the book’s author, despite being, by all accounts, an ‘expert’ in his field, really was unaware of research going on not too far away, then there is a failure of communication. (In this case, there might also be the often self-imposed disconnect between the ‘design’ community, and the ‘engineering’ community: the assumption that research done in a different field is irrelevant or likely not to be understandable. That, perhaps, is another problem again.)

This type of communication failure is not necessarily entirely the fault of either side, but it is a problem, across all fields of knowledge and endeavour. So what’s the answer?

I don’t know, from that kind of distance, but closer up, I have a hunch that broad subject blog families, such as Scienceblogs, ‘research digest’ blogs such as the British Psychological Society‘s, and individual blogs with a fairly wide scope, such as Mind Hacks (these latter two both examples from the same field) are going to become increasingly important mechanisms for disseminating research advances to both an academic and a wider audience. Whether the actual awareness of a particular new piece of research comes directly by a researcher reading the site, or by a colleague or friend-of-a-friend referring the researcher, the path from ignorance to awareness is (potentially) shorter and easier than before. It’s (potentially) less likely that anyone reasonably well-informed about a field will not have had an opportunity to learn about other research in the field, at least that which is either newly published or which somehow comes to the attention of the bloggers (so the bloggers’ filtering and discriminatory abilities are very important, in this sense).

Something I’m planning to do, on this blog, from now on, is to review useful or interesting academic papers or journal articles (or books, of course) I come across, from a variety of academic areas, which are relevant to the field of architectures of control, and design for behaviour change in general – shot through the lens of my PhD research focus, extracting pertinent arguments, quotes, following up references, and so on. I hope, in some small way, this will also bring particular areas of research to the attention of researchers from other disciplines, in the same way (for example) that Lawrence Lessig’s “code is law” concept made me think more about constraints and behaviour-shaping in product design in the first place.

From a practical point of view, this approach also seems like it might be a very useful way to document the process of getting to grips with the literature on a subject – helping immensely when it comes to putting together my actual literature review for the PhD – and allowing input (commentary, recommendations, suggestions) from a very diverse set of readers worldwide, in a way which the traditional ivory tower or even open-plan research office doesn’t, or can’t, at least during this stage of the research. While I’m sure there are plenty of other people who’ve had a similar idea (any links would be very interesting: I love seeing how other people structure their research), this approach seems quite excitingly fresh to me, imbuing the literature review process with a vibrancy and immediacy that simply wouldn’t have been as easy to do in the past.

Back in January, in a post looking at the use of forcing functions in education, I mentioned a type of textbook I remembered having somewhere which guided the user through learning in a kind of ‘choose your own adventure‘ style – depending on the answers the reader gave, he or she is routed through the book in a different order, with areas of weakness addressed in more detail to ensure better understanding before allowing the reader to progress to the next level.

At the time of the original post I mocked up how I remembered the pages looked – luckily, after a house move, I’m pleased to say I’ve now found the two textbooks I had, from 1971, and – after the jump – I’ve posted a set of photos to illustrate the system better. I love the way they’re described as textbook teaching machines (following B F Skinner’s lead [PDF]): this really is the application of machine design, or at least pseudo-programming, to a textbook, and, while I don’t know how effective the system really was in terms of advancing readers’ understanding, this type of thinking must have the potential to be relevant in other areas of interaction design…

How the system works. I’d be very interested to know of other similar textbook or guided learning systems – are they commonly used today? These particular books – proudly displaying the ‘Metric Key’ logo were aimed at adults working mainly within civil service jobs where metrication was being implemented.

Note that the Student Record Sheet specifically orders the student not to use pencil: if you’re dithering about what the right answer is (and hoping to be able to erase it) then you should move to a remedial stage to sort out that dithering.

The different levels of ‘response’: Correct. Now read on; You have made a common error; You have made an important error; You failed to make an important distinction; and the (perhaps dreaded) You have failed to grasp a principle.

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.

But its ViewFinder image gallery website* sadly falls into the trap of trying to restrict public engagement rather than make it easy. Yes, someone specified the old ‘right click disabled‘ policy:

Screenshots of this page, launched from this page.

Now, the image in question – here’s a direct link – which happens to be an engraving of the former Datchet bridge**, in 1840 according to this page (with a colour image) is, even taking English Heritage’s “1860-1922” suggested date range, surely out of copyright, so presumably there cannot be any ‘legal’ question over ‘letting’ people save a copy (which is easiest to do by right-clicking on the most common operating systems and browsers). Using Javascript to remove the browser toolbars and menus also hides the ability to print the image for most users, presumably also deliberately.

Yes, of course, many (most?) readers of this post will know how to get around the no-right-click architecture of control, but you’re reading a technology blog; think of whom the site is presumably aimed at. It is supposed to be a resource to encourage public engagement with history and heritage. Most users will be computer-literate enough to know how to search and probably familiar with right-clicking, but not to mess round with selectively disabling Javascript. Why should they have to? Incidentally, if you do disable Javascript entirely, you can’t even view an enlarged image at all:

What actual use to the public, other than for momentary on-screen interest, is a photo archive website where nothing can be ‘done’ with the images? What is a child doing a local history project supposed to do? Order a print at £18.80 for each photo and then scan it in? Does English Heritage really think that the ability for someone to save or print or e-mail a low-resolution 72 dpi image is going to devalue or compete with the organisation in some way?

It’s ridiculous: such a short-sighted, narrow-mindset policy removes a significant proportion of the usefulness of the site. I don’t know whether the site developer did this with or without English Heritage’s instruction or cognizance (and it was in 2002, so perhaps different thinking would apply today), but it seems that no-one bothered to think through what an actual user might want to get from interacting with the site.

In fact, regardless of the fact that this particular image (as with many others on the site) is in the public domain, even the images which are still under copyright (or “© English Heritage.NMR” as the site puts it, NMR being the National Monuments Record) should, of course, be freely downloadable, printable, and do-whatever-you-want-able. Their acquisition, preservation and cataloguing were paid for by the public, and they should all be available as widely, and easily, as possible. As it is, I would call the website a waste of public money, since it does not appear to offer what most intended users would expect and need.

Still, at least the site’s not one giant bundle of Flash. That would make it marginally more hassle to extract the images.

*Partially funded by the Big Lottery Fund, and thus not entirely directly taxpayer-funded, unless one regards the National Lottery as an extra tax on the hopeful and desperate, which some commentators would.
**Almost exactly the spot where I’ve been testing a prototype radio-controlled toy for a client this very afternoon, in fact, though the bridge is long gone.

Henry Ellis-Paul’s Tap Meter, above, which was also exhbited at the Ideal Home Show, shows the user the amount of water used in that particular instance. As he says, “this information changes the user’s habits and behaviour through involvement and emotional attachment to the product” – it could also presumably be used to measure out the amount of water used for recipes or to ensure that we each drink the right amount each day.

Stefan Grosvenor’s Water and energy saving tap (above) additionally addresses electricity usage due to hot water, combining both water and electricity usage in an ‘equation’ to make users more aware of the total impact they have each time they turn the tap. The project was intended as a future concept for the Red Cross, to be used as part of a campaign which would “both help others less fortunate, as well as educating users with their potential.”

Meghana Vaidyanathan’s Squirt (above) is specifically intended for children, hence the bright colours and anthropomorphism of the design:

At our current consumption rate, it is predicted that we could use up to 40% more water in the next 20 years. Squirt is an awareness-based water meter designed for children aged 3 to 6 and aims to instil conservational etiquette in the mind of a child. Squirt has a child-friendly interface and displays the amount of water consumed over a period of time from the tap to which it is attached.

The term “conservational etiquette” is interesting – how easy is it to instil a social constraint of this kind in western societies where the resource is (apparently, at least) in abundance? Most of us have a conservational etiquette regarding money, and thus many ‘speedometer’-type devices – such as Wattson – incorporate a display translating the energy usage into its financial consequences.

This could, of course, go further – as Crosbie Fitch comments,

[Car] fuel economy would probably be greatly improved if there was a UI that could simulate the consumptive clink of a particular denomination of coin (at the users’ choice).

and:

I’m not sure how many owners of gas guzzlers would like to enable the sounding of a cash register ding each time 10 pence worth of fuel had been consumed.

Just imagine the cacophony whenever the Chelsea tractor driver uses kick-down.

This post is the start of a series that will only be of interest to a few readers, but it’s about a subject that means a lot to me, and about a place which, in one way or another, has had an impact on design, and design education, in the UK and beyond. Brunel University has just sold its Runnymede campus to Oracle Residential, part of the Epsom-based Oracle Group, a property and investment company.

Oracle’s announcement on its website, under ‘Latest acquisitions’ (it’s Flash-based and unlinkable) is a little more detailed than Brunel’s rather terse statement – even if it skirts the issue of what they’re going to do with the place – and at least recognises some of what’s interesting about it:

Acting on behalf of oversees investors, Oracle Residential are pleased to confirm the acquisition of the Brunel University Runnymede Campus for £46.5m. Situated on the outskirts of Egham town centre, the 67 acres of mature parkland and woods is currently occupied by Royal Holloway, University of London for student accommodation. The site currently contains around 350,000 sq ft of buildings, some of which are listed.

With far reaching views of Windsor Castle, the site has extensive grounds which include an Area of Landscape Importance, Ancient Woodland and a Site of Nature Conservation Importance – all of which will need to be protected in any development proposals for the site.

Regional Director Scott Hammond believes that the site’s significance in terms of nature conservation and historical importance means that any proposals would need to be of a highly sensitive nature; “once occupation of the building is secured in September, we will begin the process of restoring some of the dilapidated and unsightly buildings, and seek to enhance the Green Belt nature of the site”.

King Sturge acted for the University in the disposal of the site.

I was a student at Runnymede from 2000-4, and a member of the last graduating year to be based there. Runnymede – once the Royal Indian Engineering College, and later Shoreditch College – was Brunel’s design school: a self-contained, single-subject campus out on its own, on top of Cooper’s Hill, Englefield Green – the first piece of high ground to the west of central London, with views over Heathrow and the Staines Reservoirs as well as Windsor Castle, Magna Carta Island and the Thames. It was a very interesting place to be a student, in many ways: there was enforced isolation, but we could call it ‘hothousing’; there was clearly never much money for buying new equipment, but there was a pride in using what was there to produce astonishing results; there was a lot of stress, but also proof of the total miscibility of work and play. And indeed workshop and kitchen, swarf and carpet, spray-booth and corridor, daytime and nighttime.

I know that to a large extent, I fell in love with the location before I really ‘got’ the course; the Open Day I attended, in June 1999, was sunny and beautiful, and the whole place struck me (and still strikes me) as one of the most perfect places in south-east England: a hilltop idyll with Elizabethan oak trees and Victorian parkland, yet close enough to the lure of London. Certainly many of the student halls of residence were decaying, but no more so than many, many others. The Royal Holloway students living there at present are right to complain about the place not being up to what they had been led to expect, but from what my girlfriend tells me of some of the (now demolished) halls at Holloway, Runnymede wasn’t that bad.

Of course it is much, much too late now to dwell on the decision to move the Design department to Uxbridge – one of the seemingly few concrete [sic.] decisions made about Runnymede during Brunel’s 27-year tenure of the site, since absorbing Shoreditch College in 1980. The department is merged into the School of Engineering & Design, it’s a very different set-up, they’ve taken me on to do a PhD, and I’m very pleased about that.

As for Runnymede – even in the early 1990s (gleaned from reading old documents in the library) there were proposals for selling the campus to various other organisations, such as an independent schools’ association (to use as an HQ), and in the last few years, suggested uses included temporary housing for Heathrow Terminal 5 workers, a new ‘Brunel Academy’ for underprivileged inner-city teenagers, a conference centre, a permanent expansion for Royal Holloway (both teaching and accommodation), and an administrative HQ for Brunel itself, away from the construction-site hubbub of Uxbridge. But in the end, it came down to this: sale to a property company, just as Brunel did with its (equally historic) Osterley and Twickenham. I don’t know (yet) what Oracle’s plans are: I do know that Englefield Green has a lot of executive homes and apartments already and surely doesn’t need too many more.

This is the first in a series of posts looking at some of the history of the Runnymede campus, both long past and recent, the plans for the site as they become clearer, and how it will all affect the local area. I intend to do some research in that vein, and report back semi-regularly. In the meantime, some photos of the campus: from ‘Hostler’ (2001), part 1; part 2; and some of my own, from 2004, in no real order.

UPDATE: This 2-page PDF (produced summer 2008) introduces the research

I’ve taken the plunge, and will be starting a PhD in September at Brunel University, Uxbridge, in the School of Engineering & Design.

The chosen subject incorporates both a formal investigation and review of certain architectures of control in design, and practical application of them for what I see as a worthwhile purpose: reducing the environmental impact of consumer products. This is an area which has come up quite a few times on the blog and in my previous research, and which I feel is both timely and worthy of a detailed treatment. The initial official title of the research is Reducing the environmental impact of products by using design to change user behaviour, and I’ve quoted a slightly shortened version of my brief tentative proposal below:

Introduction

Much research has concentrated on reducing the environmental impact of consumer products through improving manufacturing methods, efficiency of operation, and end-of-life processes. Attention is also being turned to changing consumers’ behaviour to the same end, through public education, policy and taxation emphasis — and product design methods, on which this study will focus.

Various techniques allow the characteristics of a product’s use phase to be influenced in favour of increased sustainability or reduced environmental impact. In purely technological terms, increased efficiency of operation is clearly a major goal, yet it may also be equally — and independently — important to reduce or otherwise to alter the period or manner of the product’s use, and that means changing users’ behaviour. Methods of achieving this, by using design techniques, range from ‘hard’ coercive constraints (technology which ‘refuses’ to be operated in a certain manner) to ‘softer’ psychological constraints which encourage or guide the consumer to use the product in a different way. The field lies at the intersection of technology and human factors, with the limits of any approach’s impact being determined by both technological and interaction design issues.

The study

This study will, in the first phase, review and characterise existing and novel design- and technology-led approaches to changing users’ behaviour to reduce the environmental impact of products. Donald Norman’s concepts of forcing functions and behaviour-shaping constraints, Shigeo Shingo’s poka-yoke methods, and B.J. Fogg’s ‘captology’ research at Stanford are pertinent here as starting points, since while these have been developed in the contexts of interaction design, manufacturing engineering and computer science respectively, there is significant potential to apply similar thinking with environmental considerations in mind; as far as the author is aware, this has not previously been done systematically.

A few specific technological approaches include: use of interlocks to ensure users make decisions or perform actions in the ‘right’ order when the ‘wrong’ order can be detrimental environmentally; sensors to shut down functionality when a product is not being used (e.g. motion-detection for lighting); sensors which prevent unnecessary energy use (e.g. a vehicle throttle which prevents over-revving when stationary); and the use of designed-in obsolescence to produce ‘optimum environmental lifetime’ products which expire at predetermined lifetimes, perhaps even using active disassembly techniques.

The second phase will involve testing-out of selected approaches through user trials and simulated trials of a number of functional product prototypes incorporating the behaviour constraints to determine levels of actual environmental benefit, and establish the technological and human factors affecting the ‘real-world’ applicability of these. Comparing life-cycle analyses of existing products’ use phases with those of the prototypes will allow a quantitative assessment of the benefits of different techniques in these contexts.

For example (illustrative only): A lot of electricity is wasted due to over-filling of electric kettles — a trial might compare prototypes ranging from the ‘soft’ constraint of a kettle with clearer visual/audio indications of fill level (prominent ‘x cups of water’ display) or financial implications of the energy use (‘Boiling this amount of water will cost you x pence’), through a kettle with a requirement to pre-select the water fill-level before filling (hence forcing the user to think about what he or she is doing), to a more extreme constraint of a kettle which will only boil one cup of water at a time — rapidly, but ensuring there can be no over-filling. Analysing the results of user trials of a range of prototypes such as these, and comparing with the energy usage of a conventional kettle, would allow actual energy savings to be quantified, and the limits of efficacy due to human factors (e.g. user frustration or misunderstanding) to be established. (The kettle examples described here are simplistic but this is the sort of approach intended.)

Another aim is to develop a ‘toolkit’ of tested design approaches, with relative efficacies and pertinent issues specified, to be of use to designers and engineers looking to create more environmentally friendly products. The outcome here would be an accessible publication (a short book, eBook and/or presentation, separate from the thesis) illustrating and detailing the techniques, made available to companies and students. It is hoped that government eco-design initiatives may also be interested in the practical implications of the work.

Background

The author studied Industrial Design Engineering at Brunel from 2000-4, and did a (taught) Cambridge-MIT Institute Master’s in Technology Policy from 2004-5. He has since worked in freelance design engineering and product design for a number of clients including, currently, Sir Clive Sinclair. His Master’s dissertation (and ongoing independent research in this area) investigated ‘architectures of control’: intentionally controlling user behaviour, mainly for political and commercial reasons, in a variety of fields, especially the built environment and digital rights. This forms a useful background to the proposed study.

Contribution to knowledge

The aim of the study will be to address these questions, reformulated as appropriate: How can users’ behaviour be changed, through redesign of products, to reduce environmental impact? Which methods are most suitable for specific situations? How significant are the impact reductions, and what technology and human factors issues affect the implementations? It is hoped that the process of investigating and answering these questions, together with an outcome synthesising the practical applications (the ‘toolkit’ described above), in addition to the thesis, will constitute an original, distinct and useful contribution to knowledge.

I’m excited: this gives me a fantastic opportunity to develop and extend the architectures of control research into what I consider to be a positive area (rather than the generally distasteful social engineering/’security’/designed-in-compliance/economic lock-in), which was otherwise going to be very difficult. I’m very lucky, thanks to the efforts of my supervisor, to have a studentship, which effectively means that this PhD is a job in environmentally sensitive design research, at one of the best technological design institutions in the UK.

I’ll continue to chart and examine all architectures of control via this blog, of course, but will now have the backing of some academic credibility – and resources – which should allow a more rigorous level of analysis, and exposure to expertise, precedents and inspirations.

The decision to go for a PhD wasn’t taken lightly; deciding how to progress professionally is something which has been taxing me for some time, alongside the challenges of freelance work (one reason why this blog has suffered over the last few months). I’m aware that it is not going to be easy, by any means (Tom Coates’ article – and the appended comments – and Rich Watts’ blog, for example, were very helpful in this regard), but it’s a long time since a project has excited me as much as this one, and I take that as a very positive sign.

Why Brunel? It’s where I did my undergraduate degree (although at the Runnymede campus, very different to Uxbridge), and many of the same staff, research strengths and commercial partnerships remain or have further developed. The university has greatly expanded the promotion of engineering and design and, as a future part of the University of London, seems a lot more confident about itself. While I very much enjoyed my time at Cambridge doing my Master’s, and it sparked my academic interest in architectures of control (specifically, in Frank Field’s lectures, both in person and via MIT videolink), I want (using my background) to develop the subject in a design context, which Cambridge does not offer in the same way.

The success of this blog in attracting some amazing, insightful comments (from what I can assume are amazing, insightful readers) has also given me a lot more confidence that taking this research further is not just worthwhile, but something I really must do, and I’m very grateful to all who’ve helped along the way so far.

The next post will review some of the ‘environmental architectures of control’ examples (both real and suggested) which I already have on my list, from this blog and elsewhere. Other than that, my girlfriend and I are off to Dublin for a few days’ break, and I’ve pledged not to take any work with me, physically or mentally, so let’s hope the spam filter can take care of the blog until next week!

In part 1 of ‘What I’ve learned so far…’ I looked mostly at being a ‘jack-of-all-trades’ and the idea of ‘Wexelblat’s scheduling algorithm’ (or the ‘good, fast, cheap: pick two’ theory) as it applies to a young freelancer starting out. There were some very insightful comments which are also well worth reading.

Before starting on Part 2, I feel I should apologise for the relative dearth of posts recently. This seems to be a recurring pattern, although this time it’s actually resulting in some people unsubscribing in Bloglines… The reason is primarily that I’ve had a series of projects which have taken a lot out of me, time-, sanity- and confidence-wise. I can’t really explain too much at this point, but referring to Client Breeds 6, 7, 8 and 11 as explained at the excellent FreelanceSwitch should give some hints! Suffice to say, I hope never to make the same series of mistakes again. A later part of this series will be my own take on the ‘Client Breeds’ idea and managing different clients’ expectations, but for the moment, on with Part 2:

The Portfolio Dip

When you’re at university, college, or working on design in your spare time, the rate at which you add new work to your portfolio can be equal to the rate you do the work. If you do three projects in the final year of your degree, you can add three projects. But when you start doing ‘real’ projects for companies, they’re likely to be confidential, at least until they reach production (if they even go this far), so you can’t show anyone. This applies, of course, to designers working full-time for a company as well as freelancers, but is more importnat for freelancers. (Incidentally, a friend of mine whom I’d classify as an extremely successful freelancer, suggests that only 1 out 10 potential products developed for clients are ever likely to reach mass production, and he makes that clear to the clients as he goes, which is something I’ve been far too reticent about doing.)

Back to the point: the confidentiality requirements mean that – superficially at least – your portfolio starts to look a bit stale (e.g. this). The rate of new work added drops sharply, and this can certainly have an effect on your own confidence quite apart from – we might expect – not being so persuasive to potential clients. (If you’re also, sensibly, weeding out some of the older projects of which you’re not quite so proud – too studenty, too weak – then as well as the size of the portfolio decreasing, the period it covers may also decrease to a narrow focus around, say, the final two years of your degree. And the rate of work added actually goes negative.) Roughly, you might end up with something like this:

If the most recent stuff you can show them is a student project, or even a speculative competition entry hacked together in your spare time (if any), then they may well treat you like a student or a speculative chancer rather than a professional designer. What they expect to pay you could also be in accordance with this.

Equally, even if the early freelance jobs you take on do reach production quickly, or can be shown without a confidentiality worry, they’re not necessarily going to be especially impressive. For example, I’m grateful for getting the job of making new signage (below) for a local sandwich shop, to the client’s design, but putting this into a portfolio primarily focusing on more technically innovative work may well dilute its appeal to certain prospective clients.

All of the above reinforces something very important. Industrial experience during a degree – ideally a summer internship or an actual sandwich year placement – can be extremely valuable, especially if some of what you worked on has reached production by the time you graduate or start your freelance career. In effect, this work can help ‘plug’ the portfolio gap, with real-life, commercially viable products which may even be familiar to potential clients already. While choosing a sandwich course makes your degree longer – and that year’s wages may be very low – with the right choice of company and some hard work, you may have an asset which makes your portfolio work stand out above others’.

It is remarkable… how often thinking for oneself will lead us to conclusions written about before we were born.

From a post by Vera Bass, ‘Teaching requires learning’, 6th November 2006.

Many people have probably also said this, but that’s the point, pretty much.