Congress shall pass no law limiting the rights of persons to manipulate, operate, or otherwise utilize as they see fit any of their possessions or effects, nor the sale or trade of tools to be used for such purposes.

From Artraze commenting on this Slashdot story about the levels of DRM in Windows 7.

I think it maybe needs some qualification about not using your things to cause harm to other people, but it’s an interesting idea. See also Mister Jalopy’s Maker’s Bill of Rights from Make magazine a couple of years ago.

One of the presentations I’m really looking forward to at OpenTech 2008 in London is by AMEE, self-described as “The world’s energy meter”:

If all the energy data in the world were accessible, what would you build? The Climate Change agenda has created an imperative to measure the energy profile of everything. As trillions of pounds flow into re-inventing how we consume, we have a unique opportunity use open data and systems as a starting point. AMEE is an open platform for energy and CO2 data, algorithms and transactions.

From this PDF on the AMEE website:

AMEE is a neutral aggregation platform to measure and track all the energy data in the world. It combines monitoring, profiling and transactional systems to enable this, as well as an algorithmic engine that applies conversion factors from energy into CO2 emissions.
…
# AMEE is a technology platform (a web-service API) , designed to be built upon by you
# AMEE can represent both copyright and open data without conflict
# AMEE is open source
# You can build commercial applications using AMEE

This does sound extremely useful – the ability to convert energy into CO2 emission equivalent “enables the calculation of the “Carbon-Footprint” of anything” – and I’m going to see how I might be able to make use of AMEE’s functionality or the data set as part of the research. (As an aside, it’s interesting how often ‘energy methods’ allow us to compare diverse activities and effects with a common currency: I remember being struck by this concept before when being introduced to von Mises’ criterion in stress analysis and streamlined lifecycle analysis within a few days of each other.)

AMEE’s Gavin Starks also presented at O’Reilly’s ETech earlier this year (one day I’m sure I’ll go to this…) and the slides are available [PDF, 8MB]. On a similar theme, the very impressive Saul Griffith (of MIT Media Lab, Squid Labs, Instructables, Make et al) talked on ‘energy literacy’ – again, a detailed presentation [PDF, 7.6MB] with thoughtful notes (see also Wattzon) – and it seems that there is a certain degree of overlap, or symbiosis between the ideas. We need a public literate in energy to care enough about measuring and changing their behaviour; we equally need good and understandable energy-using behaviour data to enable that public to become literate in the consequences of their actions, and indeed for ‘us’ (designers/engineers/technologists/policymakers…) to understand what behaviours we want to address.

I’d like to think that Design for Sustainable Behaviour can help here. That’s certainly the aim of what I’m doing.

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.

Seminar Announcement:
Using design to shape user behaviour:
Design with Intent and Persuasive Technology

Dan Lockton, Cleaner Electronics Research Group
27th May 2008, 11.00a.m. (Approx. length 45 mins)
Room TA049 – Tower A, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex UB8 3PH

Everyone welcome.

Design can be used to persuade, guide and shape users’ behaviour. Anything designed for user interaction can be designed to embody intended ‘target’ behaviours, whether for socially beneficial or purely commercial reasons.

The emerging interaction design field of Persuasive Technology incorporates some of these ideas, mainly applying them to software and motivational games which guide users to change their behaviour for socially beneficial reasons, e.g. keeping fit (Brunel’s Gillian Swan’s ‘Square-Eyes‘ project has been cited in some of the literature) or giving up smoking.

Taking a much broader look across product design, engineering, architecture and computer science, a range of approaches to designing for intended behaviour emerges, and a more general concept of ‘Design with Intent’ can be identified, with techniques from one discipline being applicable in others. My research specifically involves guiding more environmentally friendly product use – Design for Sustainable Behaviour – but the development of a general model for Design with Intent, matching target behaviours with suggested design solutions, is an important part of this.

The seminar comprises two short presentations I’ll be giving at Persuasive 2008, in Oulu, Finland, in the first week of June. It’s a practice run, if you like, but it will be extremely useful to get feedback and reaction from a Brunel audience, and I hope it’ll be interesting and inspirational.

1. Design with Intent: Persuasive Technology in a Wider Context
This is a paper to be presented at the conference, and appearing in H. Oinas-Kukkonen et al. (eds.): Persuasive 2008, LNCS 5033. Berlin Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2008. pp. 274 – 278

2. Kairos: Just-in-Time Feedback as a Design with Intent technique
This is an invited presentation to be given at the doctoral consortium which forms part of the conference.

Dan Lockton (Year 1 PhD student)
Daniel.Lockton@brunel.ac.uk | http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk (research blog)

Supervisors: Professor David Harrison, Professor Neville Stanton

Thanks to Lyn Edgecock and everyone who’s helped set this up.

This series is looking at what design techniques/mechanisms are applicable to guiding a user to follow a process or path, performing actions in a specified sequence. The techniques fall roughly into three ‘approaches’. In this post, I’m going to examine the Poka-yoke approach. If you’ve been following the previous posts, you’ll probably have thought, “Well, all that’s pretty obvious.” And it is obvious – we encounter these kinds of design techniques in products and systems every day – but that’s part of the point of this bit of the research: understanding what’s out there already.

Poka-yoke approach

The mechanisms described in this approach are all based on technical (rather than explicitly human) factors, and involve designing the relationships between system elements.

Poka-yoke (Japanese: mistake-proofing) is an approach usually applied in manufacturing engineering, developed by Shigeo Shingo in the context of developing ‘zero defect’ assembly processes. The idea is to avoid slip-type errors by designing systems which prevent them occurring, prevent a user proceeding until the error condition has been rectified (control poka-yokes), or at the very least clearly warn the user of the error condition (warning poka-yokes).

Generally, when the design intent is for the user to follow a process or path in a specified sequence, a deviation from that sequence can be considered as an error, and thus the poka-yoke approach can be applicable outside its original field. Similar concepts, forcing functions, have been developed in interaction design, especially in the work of Donald Norman – the three main forcing function mechanisms, Interlock, Lock-in and Lock-out, broadly correspond to Shingo’s control poka-yoke category; all can help in assisting (or forcing) users to follow a process or sequence. In the warning poka-yoke category, the Arrangement detection mechanism is most relevant to this behaviour.

Interlock

An Interlock combines elements of both lock-ins and lock-outs (see below), and is probably the most familiar forcing function mechanism: the ability to use one function is dependent on another running or being started, another component (such as a guard) being in place, or some other condition being fulfilled.

Example: This Toyota Verso requires the clutch pedal to be depressed before the starter button will operate, to reduce the risk of starting in gear.

Car ignitions which cannot be operated unless the driver’s seat belt is fastened – a system originally promoted as ‘Interlock’ in the US – microwave ovens not operating unless the door is closed, and airline or train toilets where the lighting does not operate until the user has locked the door, are some of the highest profile everyday examples, but the principle of the interlock is extremely common in engineering and manufacturing industry, often in the context of a machine tool which will not start until a guard is in place, or where opening the case automatically cuts the power.

Interlocks are often specified when it is imperative – rather than merely desirable – that a user follow a particular sequence, or at least two steps of a sequence, in exactly the right order, but their use need not be limited to critical safety design problems. Ecodesign applications might include (for example) a car’s air conditioning system requiring the windows to be fully closed before operating, or a sink requiring the plug to be in before the tap can be left in a ‘running’ position.

Example: The ubiquitous interlock on a microwave oven ensures that the door is closed before the oven will start.

Lock-in

The Lock-in mechanism in this context (rather than an economic one) refers to a system arranged such that a process, procedure or operation is kept active – the user can’t exit the operation until a certain condition is met, or the ‘correct’ next step is taken. This can be implemented using sensors, logic processing, physical architecture, or a number of other ways.

As Norman puts it, this prevents “someone from prematurely stopping” an operation – this could mean letting some ongoing process run its course to completion before starting the next, or denying the user access to another function which might interfere with the current process. It can also prevent accidental cancelling of an operation – inadvertent deviation from a specified sequence – by introducing an extra ‘confirmation’ step.

Example: The confirmation dialogue displayed by some software when a user attempts to exit can be seen as a lock-in to prevent inadvertent ending of the application.

Lock-out

Lock-out is closely related to Lock-in: in this case, the mechanism makes it difficult or impossible for the user to start certain operations, or denies or impedes access to particular areas or functions. In the context of encouraging or forcing a user to follow a path or process in a specified sequence, a lock-out helps prevent inadvertent or mistaken steps in that sequence. It can also help prevent an operation being started too early in the sequence, and may also be implemented as an extra ‘confirmation’ step.

Example: This file backup application prevents a user modifying the properties of a scheduled backup task while it is running – ensuring that the correct sequence is followed.

Arrangement detection

Arrangement detection is a ‘warning’ rather than ‘control’ poka-yoke mechanism, and may be considered as a ‘feedback’ analogue of interlocks, lock-ins and lock-outs – providing a warning (audible, visual, tactile) when system elements are incorrectly arranged (physically or procedurally).

Arrangement detection is about warning the user that the path or process is occurring in an incorrect sequence, rather than actually forcing the user to follow the correct sequence. While there are a number of possible warning poka-yoke mechanisms alerting users to incorrect behaviour, arrangement detection is most relevant to the specific issue of sequencing.

Example: The seat belt warning on car dashboards (in this case a Fiat Punto) is an arrangement detection poka-yoke, providing a visual (and often also audible) alert that a belt is not buckled while the engine is running, or the car is moving.

In part 4, we’ll look at the Persuasive Interface approach to getting someone to do things in a particular order.

These are the suggested mechanisms applicable to User follows process or path, performing actions in a specified sequence – they fall roughly into three ‘approaches’. In this post, I’m going to examine the System element approach.

System element approach

This approach includes mechanisms relating to the layout and properties of system elements, hence all technical rather than human factors.

Placing, Spacing and Orientation – how system elements are laid out – are some of the most fundamental mechanisms a designer can employ to help a user to follow a process or path in the intended sequence, and can be used both in the ‘real’ world and, as metaphors, in software. Movement or oscillation, as an ‘action’ property of system elements, which may involve changing their placing/spacing/orientation, can also be used to help achieve similar aims.

Placing

Placing may be implemented as simply as arranging interactive elements (functions, buttons, shops, products on shelves – effectively, anything) in sequence so that a user interacts (sees / notices / experiences / uses) them in the ‘right’ order. This might involve actually hiding one element behind another so that the first ‘must’ be dealt with before progressing to the next (or only displaying the second element once the first has been dealt with), but often this is not necessary: users will tend to interact with elements in a predictable sequence, at least where it is clear which direction the sequence is meant to progress (compare reading directions in different alphabets, for example, and the effect this has on the layout of interfaces).

Example: The elements of Amazon’s order process, revealed to the user in sequence

Placing can also involve arranging (non-interactive) elements to ‘channel’ users along a path in an intended sequence – walls, fences and guard rails are obvious architectural examples, but there are more subtle ones too, such as the layout of some casinos in which winners are ‘funnelled’ past many lures on their way to a single cashier.

Example: Guard rails are placed to channel pedestrians away from crossing at the mouth of a road junction

Spacing

Spacing – deliberate separation of system elements in space – can also be used strategically to cause users to follow a path or sequence of operations or interactions. For example many supermarkets are laid out with common items such as milk and bread at the back of the store, meaning that shoppers pass many other shelves of items (with potential for impulse purchase) on the way to their ‘target’, and on the way back to the checkouts at the front of the store.

Spacing can also be used to cause users to follow procedures requiring a delay between performing operations – the ‘on’ switch for a lathe may be spaced far enough away from the chuck that it is impossible for the operator’s fingers to be in a dangerous position as the device is switched on. Along similar lines, spacing light switches for different parts of a corridor or stairway apart so that they must each be switched on in sequence individually when needed (rather than allowing users to switch them all on at once) may reduce unnecessary electricity use.

Example: Dairy items are often positioned to drive traffic to the rear of a supermarket. Image from wander.lust

Orientation

Orientation is necessarily related to placing and spacing – the relative angle or attitude of system elements can be used as a mechanism for encouraging or channelling users to follow a path or perform actions in sequence. A trivial example is the use of angled walls to ‘funnel’ pedestrians along a particular path. It can also be used to cause users themselves to change their orientation in response, where this is part of an intended sequence of user behaviour – the staggered pedestrian crossings which make sure users turn to face the direction of oncoming traffic, as mentioned in Part 1, use the changing orientation of the walkway to change users’ orientation.

Example: A staggered pedestrian crossing designed so that users face oncoming traffic. Image from the UK Highway Code.

Movement or oscillation

Movement or oscillation may involve changing the placing/spacing/orientation of system elements, and can be applied in a physical or metaphorical sense. A moving indicator which guides the user through a process or sequence, or indeed, brings system elements which require interaction to the user (or routes them past), encourages (or forces) following procedures in the ‘right’ order.

Consider this mechanism as a dynamic implementation of placing/spacing/orientation: it has the potential to control much more fully the order in which users are exposed to objects or functions. The most obvious examples are conveyors on production lines, bringing components or products to stationary workers in the right sequence, but even museum exhibits such as the Crown Jewels may be displayed in a rotating or constantly moving case, which displays them to visitors in a certain order and reduces the possibility of undesired interactions.

Example: A conveyor (such as this on a Krispy Kreme doughnut preparation line) brings products or components to workers in the right sequence. Image from Silversprite

In part 3, we’ll look at the Poka-yoke approach to getting someone to do things in a particular order.

Back in January, I introduced the Design with Intent method on the blog. I’ve been developing this since then, and, suitably tested and refined, it should form the first stage of the PhD.

Essentially, the DwI Method is intended to be a structured ‘suggestion engine’, where a target behaviour is put in one end, and a range of applicable mechanisms and design techniques, both physical and psychological, come out of the other. The aim is for it to be useful to designers, engineers, architects, policy-makers, and planners of all sorts, who aim to try and shape or change users’ behaviour in some way – and also useful to users in understanding how their behaviour might be manipulated or shaped, for their benefit or someone else’s, by the products, systems and environments around them.

The post in January looked at some of the different design techniques applicable to the target behaviour ‘No access, use or occupation, in a specific manner, by any user’, through the example of anti-homeless benches, and received some really useful feedback from readers (thanks!), as well as forcing me to think more clearly about how the method is structured. Since then the method has evolved considerably, but it’s not yet in the form I want to publish. However, I thought it would be interesting to share an example of applying the method as it currently stands, to a different target behaviour: getting someone to do things in a particular order.

The target behaviour: Introduction

Here I’ve identified a target über-behaviour – We want to shape the way a user follows a process or path – which is inherent to many design problems. There are then (at present) three target sub-behaviours, each of which is subtly different, with different design techniques applicable. In this series of posts I’m going to elaborate on User follows process or path, performing actions in a specified sequence.

Often we (designers/planners/engineers/architects) want the user to do things in a certain order, or follow a path, and are aiming to use the design of the system to help achieve that. The process or path can involve simple spatial sequencing (e.g. making sure shoppers walk past certain items on their way to the checkout), software metaphors for physical procedures (e.g. disabling the ‘Next’ button on a software wizard until required options have been confirmed), or a combination of software logic with physical space (e.g. making sure the user removes his or her bank card from an ATM before the cash is dispensed).

This target behaviour also applies to many safety measures: staggered pedestrian crossings which make sure users turn to face the direction of oncoming traffic, microwave ovens which will not start until the door is closed, cars which will not start unless the clutch is depressed or seat-belt buckled, cars where the ignition key cannot be removed until the automatic transmission is in ‘Park’ mode, machine tools which will not start until a guard is in place, and so on.

Ecodesign applications

Possible ecodesign applications may follow similar lines to the safety measures – particularly, increasing the likelihood that operations are performed in the ‘most efficient’ sequence. A kettle that requires users to pre-select the amount of water required before boiling it, for example, such as the Product Creation Eco-Kettle, aims to have users consider how much boiling water they actually need at the ‘right’ point in the sequence – before boiling. A car’s air conditioning system could require the windows to be fully closed before operating. A bathroom sink could require the plug to be in place before the tap could be left in a ‘running’ position.

Interfaces which suggest the ‘most efficient’ action to the user, at the right point (e.g. a rev-counter-linked light on a car dashboard indicating that it’s time to change gear, as formerly used on a number of Volvo models), can also help encourage users to follow the intended sequence of actions.

Applicable mechanisms/techniques

The DwI method suggests a variety of design techniques applicable to this target behaviour, which fall roughly into three ‘approaches’:

I’ll deal with each of these approaches, with examples of the mechanisms/techniques in action, in the next few posts in this series. Part 2 is up now.

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

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

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

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

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

*Required disclaimer:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DL: What are some of your highest profile projects?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ben Wilson Design | Wilson Brothers’ Blog

While it hasn’t often come across on this blog, due to most of the focus being on architectures of control, I am, both personally and professionally, very interested in lightweight transport – its design, use and potential.

‘Lightweight transport’, by my reckoning, includes anything where the intention is to transport people or goods from one place to another ‘efficiently’ – in truth, I’ve always been interested in all forms of transport (and the industrial-business complexes behind its development and manufacture) but the engineer in me is most excited by innovative ways of using as little as possible to achieve as much as possible, and in most cases, this comes down to a ‘lightweight’ mindset.

As a designer, I’ve been lucky to be involved with a few lightweight transport projects for Sir Clive Sinclair, including some work on the A-Bike (the world’s lightest, smallest folding adult bicycle) under Daka‘s Alex Kalogroulis, and currently further development work in this vein with Ben Wilson. While at Daka I also gained some experience with the Sinclair WDU wheelchair assistance unit, which inspired me to experiment with my own series of larger wheelchair drive systems, learning, practically, a bit about electric motors along the way, and becoming increasingly convinced of their potential (no pun intended).

But I’ve never tackled anything car-sized. I’ve researched and written about Reliant, one of the world’s most significant lightweight motor vehicle innovators, but have never actually designed or built something of this size. (Certainly, I’ve thought about, and sketched plenty, since I was in primary school.)

A stepping-stone towards this would be to modify (and improve, by some definition) an existing vehicle, and various factors, in combination, have inspired me to envisage tackling an electric conversion of a Bond Minicar, also (perhaps) giving it a full-length roll-back roof to produce a kind of convertible pick-up, with the batteries under the floor – to produce something like that shown in my sketch above.

The project is a very tentative idea at present, but in the next few months I hope to elaborate on what it will involve, what the technical problems are, and how I aim to go about solving them – along with an explanation of my rationale, before actually proceeding (or not). Briefly: if I can do this well, I will end up with one of the most practical vehicles possible for the near future: an ultra-manoeuvrable, ultra-light, tax-exempt, Congestion Charge-exempt, corrosion-resistant electric utility vehicle costing just pennies to run and great fun to drive.

Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah kindly sent me a link to this article by Ben Hyde:

I once had a web product that failed big-time. A major contributor to that failure was tedium of getting new users through the sign-up process. Each screen they had to step triggered the lost of 10 to 20% of the users. Reducing the friction of that process was key to survival. It is a thousand times easier to get a cell phone or a credit card than it is to get a passport or a learner’s permit. That wasn’t the case two decades ago.

…

Public health experts have done a lot of work over the decades to create barrier between the public and dangerous items and to lower barriers to access to constructive ones. So we make it harder to get liquor, and easier to get condoms. Traffic calming techniques are another example of engineering that makes makes a system run more slowly.

I find these attempts to shift the temperature of entire systems fascinating. This is at the heart of what you’re doing when you write standards, but it’s entirely scale free… In the sphere of internet identity it is particularly puzzling how two countervailing forces are at work. One trying to raise the friction and one trying to lower it. Privacy and security advocates are attempting to lower the temp and increase the friction. On the other hand there are those who seek in the solution to the internet identity problem a way to raise the temperature and lower the friction. That more rather than less transactions would take place.

The idea of ‘process friction’ which is especially pertinent as applied to architectures of control. Simply, if you design a process to be difficult to carry out, fewer people will complete it, since – just as with frictional forces in a mechanical system – energy (whether real or metaphorical) is lost by the user at each stage.

This is perhaps obvious, but is a good way to think about systems which are designed to prevent users carrying out certain tasks which might otherwise be easy – from copying music or video files, to sleeping on a park bench. Just as friction (brakes) can stop or slow down a car which would naturally roll down a hill under the force of gravity, so friction (DRM, or other architectures of control) attempts to stop or slow down the tendency for information to be copied, or for people to do what they do naturally. Sometimes the intention is actually to stop the proscribed behaviour (e.g. an anti-sit device); other times the intention is to force users to slow down or think about what they’re doing.

From a designer’s point of view, there are far more examples where reducing friction in a process is more important than introducing it deliberately. In a sense, is this what usability is?. Affordances are more valuable than disaffordances, hence the comparative rarity of architectures of control in design, but also why they stand out so much as frustrating or irritating.

The term cognitive friction is more specific than general ‘process friction’, but still very much relevant – as explained on the Cognitive Friction blog:

Cognitive Friction is a term first used by Alan Cooper in his book The Inmates are Running the Asylum, where he defines it like this:

“It is the resistance encountered by a human intellect when it engages with a complex system of rules that change as the problem permutes.”

In other words, when our tools manifest complex behaviour that does not fit our expectations, the result can be very frustrating.

Going back to the Ben Hyde article, the use of the temperature descriptions is interesting – he equates cooling with increasing the friction, making it more difficult to get things done (similarly to the idea of chilling effects), whereas my instinctive reaction would be the opposite (heat is often energy lost due to friction, hence a ‘hot’ system, rather than a cold system, is one more likely to have excessive friction in it – I see many architectures of control as, essentially, wasting human effort and creating entropy).

But I can see the other view equally well: after all, lubricating oils work better when warmed to reduce their viscosity, and ‘cold welds’ are an important subject of tribological research. Perhaps the best way to look at it is that, just as getting into a shower that’s too hot or too cold is uncomfortable, so a system which is not at the expected ‘temperature’ is also uncomfortable for the user.

UPDATE: See this more recent post for information and photos of how to get a 2-pin bulb to fit in a BC3 fitting.

BC3 reactions

The post looking at the Eaton MEM BC3 system, a couple of months ago, has become something of a reference for UK householders and renters trying to work out why they can’t fit a normal 2-pin bayonet compact fluorescent (or other bulb) in the light fittings of their new house or flat – or so I assume from some of the search strings in the server logs.

Some comments from readers highlight the frustration and inconvenience caused by the 3-pin system – and in these cases it’s people trying to use CFLs in the fittings. They’re trying to be energy-efficient, trying to comply with government advice indeed, yet a combination of ill-thought-out regulations and a razor-blade-style commercial lock-in architecture of control is preventing their success. As an example of ‘reducing the environmental impact of products by using design to change user behaviour‘, the BC3 seems to be a poorly thought-out initiative.

Increasing CFL uptake

Elsewhere, on the subject of CFLs, Duncan Drennan of The Art of Engineering blog has a very informative post looking at aspects of the CFL argument, such as comparing colour rendering indices, which are less often addressed in media articles on the subject. As Duncan makes clear – even including a spreadsheet to calculate the savings – the monetary arguments in terms of electricity saved are probably a more direct way to persuade many people than using environmental arguments.

Duncan also mentions the higher-end CFLs such as the Osram Dulux Superstar (which has a quicker start-up time to full brightness than standard CFLs). Along with CFLs which are shaped more like conventional incandescent bulbs (such as the version of the Osram Duluxstar, third from left in the first photo below), or even with more interesting forms, such as the concepts by Dutch designer Jacob de Baan (second image below), these surely have the potential to convert more householders to CFLs: the standard 3 U-tube design is rather ugly.

Above: Some types of CFL (from left: Tesco Value, GE Elegance and Osram Duluxstar) lined up next to a burned-out incandescent bulb. Note that the Osram Duluxstar – basically a standard 3 U-tube CFL with a bulb-shaped cover – is taller than even the 150W incandescent, due to the space taken up by the ballast, and this extra length can be a problem when using CFLs in existing light fixtures, shades, etc. Some companies, such as Sylvania with its Mini-Lynx Ambience range, have addressed this by making CFLs with shorter tubes and ballast such that the whole thing is the same size as a standard incandescent bulb. Below: Three CFL concepts by Jacob de Baan. Apologies for the scan quality (the images are from The Eco-Design Handbook, 2004 edition, by Alastair Fuad-Luke).

Power Factor

A rarely mentioned issue with CFLs which I realised recently (courtesy of a letter by Andrew Porter in The Engineer, a UK journal), is that of power factor. Not having studied electricity generation for some time, this is something I’d shoved to the back of my mind, but essentially it results from the phase shift between voltage and current caused by a reactive (capactive or inductive) load as opposed to a purely reactive one, and means that the actual power supplied by the power station (in volt-amps) will be greater than that indicated by simply looking at the wattage (in watts), where reactive loads are involved.

A normal incandescent filament bulb is an almost entirely resistive load, and the voltage and current will be in phase (hence a power factor of 1). But a CFL – with a significant proportion of capacitive load due to the ballast – will have a much lower power factor, perhaps only 0.5. This means that a ’15W’ CFL actually requires 30VA from the power station – which the private customer will not pay for directly, since home electricity meters only measure watts, but it is still equivalent to needing to supply double the power. That increase in necessary generation can’t be ignored: the consumer will pay for it one way or another.

Rod Elliott has a detailed examination of why the power factor should certainly be taken into account when looking at CFLs in a policy context and it’s very much worth reading for a better understanding of the issue. While fluorescent lighting ballasts with high power factors (0.95+) are available (in industrial situations, a large customer will often have to pay for the actual VA drawn by large reactive loads, such as motors), they are unlikely to be incorporated any time soon into mass-produced cheap CFLs. Elliott suggests that because fluorescent lighting is so often left on continuously (partly because of the belief that it will last longer if not switched on-and-off), in conjunction with the power factor issue, mass adoption of CFLs may actually increase the electricity used.

I don’t know to what extent policy-makers have taken the power factors of cheap CFLs into account when planning mass conversion initiatives, but in the long run, it would seem that LED home lighting (without a power factor issue), perhaps with DC ring-mains to prevent the need for multiple transformer/rectifiers, is a better solution than total adoption of CFLs.

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’.

This is the first in a series of essays where I’ll try to look at some of the realities of working freelance in this field; I hope these will be interesting and possibly useful to others contemplating this kind of work. Please note, these are only my own musings and ramblings, written mostly on train journeys across North London, and I might look back on them with embarrassment and disagreement.

At the moment, I’m a freelance designer/engineer/maker. What that means is hard to define. There are no obvious boundaries: I’ve said ‘Yes’ to almost every project, mostly out of necessity but partly out of trying to determine what I’m any good at. In practice that means that in the last year-and-a-bit I’ve worked on some diverse stuff, from developing ultra-lightweight bikes to designing novelty packaging, from researching multinationals’ brand architectures to doing toothed belt calculations for gearboxes. I’ve tested radio-controlled things in the Thames looking across at Windsor Castle, and grappled with CSS while sitting in an abandoned factory in Dalston. I’ve hand-lettered sandwich shop menu blackboards and sprayed T-shirts with the logo of a new telemetry spin-out company. There’s mechanical engineering in there, some graphics, some electronics, prototype building, even copywriting.

What it’s shown me is that a jack-of-all-trades is not necessarily master of none, but unlikely to be any more than master of some, few in fact. And the main reasons for that — so far as I can tell — are time and money.

Time

If every project is different, you pretty much have to start by spending time simply finding out what you’re doing, what the precedents are in that field, what important things you need to know, even what equipment you’ll need to do the job properly. Some clients tend to assume that anyone ‘technical’ can fix (or indeed design) absolutely anything involving engineering materials, electronics, computers, etc, and while to some extent I don’t think that’s untrue, given experience, it’s probably not the best policy always to say ‘I’ll give it a go’. But you do need to test your limits before you can know them.

Back to the point: if you have to spend a significant amount of time on each project learning about the field, each project is going to take you longer than it would for someone who already knows what’s what. And you will make mistakes, of course.

Money

What the above implies is that, as it’s going to take you longer, you’re going to have to work out how to charge. Should the client pay for your learning process? How fair is that?

One point of view would say that no, you’ve created an (intangible) asset for yourself, and the client should only pay for your time once you know what you’re doing. The other point of view says that acquisition of knowledge is a prerequisite of being able to deliver what the client wants. Just as you charge for the acquisition of materials, so should you charge for the acquisition of knowledge. I think the answer probably lies somewhere in between, but it’s difficult for a freelance person — reliant on a sporadic income anyway — to ‘write off’ days as ‘knowledge acquisition’. If you have zero income (and maybe some expenditure) for those days, then you’re going to have to budget for that somehow, and that’s something that’s difficult to plan.

A second major point regarding money is that, well, the client wants to spend as little as possible. Why has he/she/it employed you, a freelance individual with (probably) few facilities other than your brain and your hands, rather than a ‘proper’ design consultancy? Unless the client genuinely thinks you are wonderful, or are likely to come up with stunning insights or innovation which someone else wouldn’t, the reason is probably because you’re cheap, or the client thinks you’ll be cheap (‘Because you’re young, and have lower overheads, right?’).

Wexelblat’s Scheduling Algorithm

But — the client also wants you to be good. So you have to be good and cheap. And on a smaller budget, and with less expertise and experience to call on than an established consultancy. How are you going to do it?

When I was working for a couple of weeks at a well-known design consultancy in London, two experienced freelance designers, David Baird and Simon May were also working on (more important aspects of) the same project. One morning, one of them (I can’t remember if it was David or Simon) drew out on his sketchpad, this diagram…

…and said ‘You can have 2 out of 3. It’s either good and fast (and not cheap), good and cheap (and not fast) or fast and cheap (and not good). That’s what I try to tell clients.’

This stuck with me at the back of my mind; I’ve since found out it’s (sometimes) attributed as Wexelblat’s Scheduling Algorithm (presumably after Richard Wexelblat?), though also apparently an ‘old designer’s adage’ (Jason Kottke) and an ‘old Hollywood maxim‘. The impossible triangle used to illustrate it here is cleverer than what I’ve drawn above, but the principle is the same. (As with so many principles and maxims popularised through software development, it also seems to apply very well to design and physical product development.)

As we’ve seen, the client wants a project to be good and cheap. Hence, if Wexelblat is true, it’ll be slow, even if some of that slowness is accounted for by knowledge acquisition, and mistakes. But if you’re charging for that time, you’re incurring costs in the process, which tends to counter the ‘cheap’ aspect of the project. So, there’s an inherent difficulty with applying Wexelblat to jobs with a significant learning curve. If your costs are proportional to the time you spend, you can’t be cheap without also being fast, and bad (since you possibly don’t even know what you’re doing). For the inexperienced, cheap and fast and bad is possible, but good implies not fast and not so cheap unless — as we considered earlier — you’re willing/able to write off your learning time.

Reality

If the above sounds negative, I don’t mean it to. It’s exciting working on new things and building up expertise, but when clients’ primary reason for choosing you in the first place may be cheapness, you’re going to have something of a difficult compromise and balancing act on your hands, just in terms of scheduling your work and budget, let alone the specific challenges of the project in question. It might mean that your definition of ’1 day’s work’ slowly seeps into becoming ’7.30 am to 2 am’ just in order to get everything done in the same number of days you promised, and for the same cost. That’s fun for a while, but gets pretty tiring for those around you even before you get fed up.

An implication of all that is that to be competing on price alone can be a stressful game, especially when having to do so simply to get enough work means that you have a lot of learning to do for every project. It’s something of a positive feedback loop, a vicious circle. But, if you can build up enough experience in a particular field, and are able to use knowledge acquired (or problems solved) on a previous project, you have the start of something more edifying. You may still be able to compete on price, but you can now be cheap, faster and better, since you know what you’re doing. And, slowly, gradually, you might even be able to specialise in a certain field, no longer jack-of-all-trades, but actually mastering something.

In part 1 of ‘Shaping behaviour’, we took a look at ‘sticks and carrots’ as approaches for shaping (or changing) people’s behaviour. It’s especially worth reading and thinking about the comments on that post as there are some very thoughtful analyses which go beyond my rather cursory treatment. ‘Shaping behaviour’ is a vast field, encompassing pretty much all of politics, advertising and marketing alongside much of religion, education, psychology (and psychiatry?), product and graphic design.

The ‘sticks, carrots and speedometers’ classification was originally mentioned to me as a possible method by Chris Vanstone, of the UK Design Council’s former research arm, RED. The idea is that you can get people to change their behaviour by persuading (or forcing) them with ‘sticks’ (punishment/disincentives), ‘carrots’ (rewards) or ‘speedometers’ (showing them the results of their actions, how they’re doing, or how well they could be doing if they changed their behaviour). Having looked at sticks and carrots – and found the classification rather limiting – let’s take a look at speedometers.

Some gauges provide information which directly relates to a user’s actions at that time. An actual speedometer or rev counter allows the user to determine what effect his or her actions are having on a vehicle, and take corrective action if the information displayed is outside the ‘correct’ range (of course there are other factors, such as the resistance to motion from drag or going uphill, and if one can hear the engine, a rev counter’s perhaps not really necessary, but I digress). Other gauges, such as fuel or temperature gauges (see photo at top) show us information over which we can’t have so much direct influence (or, in the case of a clock, say, no influence…) but about which we need to take action if certain levels are reached. Certainly, we change our behaviour as a result of taking in the information displayed. Usually. And the speedometer can of course be a metaphor for other methods of feedback or information displays – which I’ll get to later on.

Energy use

Sticking with physical gauges for the moment, in recent times there’s been a lot of design effort put into devices which monitor and display our energy or fuel use, with the hope that they’ll persuade us to change our behaviour, or bring to our attention which devices (e.g. in a home) are more power-hungry than others in an immediately persuasive way. The Design Council’s Future Currents project, which investigated a range of interesting techniques and design approaches, put the idea well:

Energy is invisible, which makes it difficult to control. We can give people the tools to monitor their own energy use. Studies show that if people can see what they’re using, they use up to 15% less energy.

An anecdote in Kalle Lasn’s Design Anarchy claims an even larger reduction:

The manager of a housing co-op was increasingly frustrated with her tenants. No matter how much she reminded and badgered them… the tenants would not, could not reduce their energy consumption. Finally she hit an idea. What would happen, she wondered, if the electricity meters were moved from the basement to a conspicuous spot right beside the front door, so that each time the tenants left or entered their home, they could see how fast their meter was whirring? The meters were moved. Lo and behold, within a few weeks electricity consumption fell 30 percent.

(It’s not clear whether there were individual meters so tenants could see each other’s consumption – that kind of “control by embarrassment“, or social pressure, may be effective in this free-rider or unequal contribution situation.)

 
 
 
Above left: Wattbox by Gary Lockton, Brunel University, 1992, a simple unit which displayed the cost of electricity being used as well as estimated bills; Above right: ‘You make waste visible’ from Kalle Lasn’s Design Anarchy; Centre left: Wattson, from DIYKyoto; Centre right: An example ‘greenness gauge’ from the Design Council’s Future Currents project; Bottom left: Static! Flower Lamp ‘blooms’ when a household has reduced its power consumption for a period; Bottom right: Static! Power Aware Cord glows with an intensity related to the power being used. First image courtesy of Paul Turnock; other images from the websites linked.

The convergence of new monitoring and connectivity technologies such as home wireless networks and RFID, with the pressure to scrutinise our environmental impact, has meant that there are more opportunities for potentially persuasive, interesting ways of approaching this area. Tom Coates has some good thoughts on this, and the relation to continuous monitoring of other parts of our (and others’) lives, and how fascinating it can be. Wattson (thanks to both Richard Reynolds and Michelle Douglas for originally bringing this to my attention) takes an especially ‘designer’ approach, becoming a coffee-table talking point as well as showing (in different display modes) the power currently being used, the costs, and, via a coloured glow projected onto the table below, a non-numerical indication of the intensity of power usage. Similarly playful methods are used in some of the Static! projects from Stockholm’s Interactive Institute – perhaps, in fact, when the ‘event’ which occurs as the ‘speedometer’ registers more desirable values is exciting in itself, the technique is closer to a ‘carrot’ than a speedometer.

 
Left: The Energy Label, required on certain products/packaging in the EU; Right: A typical mess of adaptors powering home electronic equipment. Here we have a scanner, a power drill charger, a printer (plug hidden), a battery charger and a cutting plotter. How easy is it for a consumer to audit the power usage of this kind of mess?

The related debate over standby buttons on home electrical equipment which I covered briefly in July last year, brought home an important point to me, as someone who’s worked on quite a few consumer electronic products powered from adaptors: many users think that if a red LED is on when the product is ‘off’, that little LED is all that’s being powered. That’s quite an important issue when it comes to consumers having a better understanding of their home energy use.

When seeing the Wattson and Future Currents projects for the first time, I was tempted to say “well, why don’t people just look at the power ratings on the appliances they buy?” but soon realised that that’s a pretty entrenched engineering mindset rearing itself in my mind. People don’t want to have to look on a label on the back of the product. They mostly don’t think about energy use when buying products. Even the use of ‘green’ labelling on the front of products (e.g. the EU label shown above) doesn’t hit home the actual monetary costs of different devices over typical usage periods. In this sense, monitoring devices which really get the user interested in using products more efficiently do seem to be very much worth it, even when they themselves use more power than strictly ‘necessary’.

(There are a few points I’d like to make about home lighting and ‘energy saving’ light bulbs, especially since some aspects of the recent blogosphere commentary made me think a little further, but they can wait for another day…)

Economy gauges

 
Left: A traditional analogue vacuum gauge showing ‘fuel economy’. Image from brochure for Reliant Rialto 2, 1984; Right: Toyota’s Eco Drive meter from the Camry – image from HybridCars.com. As an aside, I have no idea how 35-40 mpg can be considered ‘excellent’! What year is this?

Moving away from home electricity consumption, the increased prevalence of electronic in-car trip computers, usually built-in, has meant that second-by-second fuel economy read-outs are much more common, and can again inspire a kind of self-challenge to maximise economy while driving. As the miles-per-gallon (or perhaps L/100 km) figure drops (or increases) with every blip on the accelerator or rapid acceleration from the traffic lights, drivers really can train themselves to change their behaviour (indeed, I know a couple of people who are constantly shifting their gaze from the road ahead down to, alternately, the speedometer and the miles per gallon figure, to see “how well they are doing”, which is not necessarily ideal). Economy gauges in cars are nothing new – vacuum gauges were quite a popular home-fit accessory at one time, but they generally did not directly relate to the fuel consumption per distance travelled, merely the vacuum in the inlet manifold, hence the amount of fuel-air mixture being drawn through, whether or not the car were moving.

An alternative type of economy gauge was that once used by Volvo and other manufacturers, which compared the engine’s rpm (or the gearbox rpm?) to the gear selected (manual only, I presume) and illuminated a gearstick icon when the driver was in the ‘wrong’ gear, i.e. driving at less than optimum efficiency. Even more simply, some car companies used to mark the ‘gearchange points’ on the speedometer with dots at certain speeds – assuming the driver could not tell from the engine note that the gear engaged was too high or low, the dots would at least give some indication, though of course different driving conditions and loads would make the dots’ positions guidelines rather than absolutes. (I do have photographs of both these designs, somewhere, but will have to post them at some point in the future.)

Speedometers and control

Certainly, then, physical speedometers and gauges can have an effect on users’ behaviour and can encourage people to change; technology seems to be making this easier and more interesting and engaging. There are so many opportunities; already in some countries, there are roadside speed displays to make motorists aware of their speed (which present a fun challenge for drivers, or indeed cyclists, wanting to see what they can achieve) – how long before we have roadside CO2 monitoring (with displays)?

But are any of these ‘architectures of control’?

In the sense that they are methods of persuasion rather than methods of restriction or enforcement, they are on one side of a line with rigid control on the other, but when we look at techniques such as the “control by embarrassment“, or social pressure mentioned earlier, we can see that there is some kind of continuum related to how the information displayed by the speedometer (of whatever form) is used: if only you can see your personal energy usage habits within a house, you can make the choice whether or not to change your behaviour, but if the rest of your household can also see your habits, and see that you’re costing them unnecessary money, the pressure on you to change is much greater.

That, I think, is where the ‘control’ element comes in. Say that every household’s yearly carbon emissions (however this were to be calculated) were monitored. If the information were available to the householders, it may give them food for thought, and may inspire changing behaviour. If the information were available to the government, it may lead to taxation, and may lead to changing behaviour. If the information were legally required to be displayed on an illuminated sign outside the house, so neighbours could see who was “getting away with more carbon emissions”, it may (perhaps) lead to people changing behaviour too, or risk recriminations from the community, possibly worse than just social embarrassment. This last case is pretty much speedometer + blackmail, and I would say that that crosses the line to become control. If you want to fit in, and not be censured by others, you have to conform. That is an architecture of control, very much so, and hence we can see that speedometers, as with many other possible design elements, can be used as part of systems of control, but are not in themselves necessarily political. It’s the way they’re used that makes them, possibly, controversial.

The speedometer metaphor

Metaphorically, of course, a speedometer can be any method of making users aware of their behaviour, or the link between their behaviour and some other effect. Many of the examples studied and created by Stanford’s Captology / Persuasive Technology lab fall into this area, offering users feedback on their actions, or encouraging them to behave in a certain way (e.g. giving up smoking) through highlighting causal relationships.

But isn’t this, to some extent, what all persuasion is about, if we allow our ‘speedometer’ to have, in some situations, only two values (on/’good’ vs off/’bad’)? Everything ‘persuasive’, from advertising campaigns to counselling, is about saying “A is happening/not happening because you’re doing/not doing B; it will be better/stop happening if you stop/start doing C.” A speedometer is saying “You’re doing OK because this is the result of your actions” or “Look at the results of your actions – you need to change what you’re doing!”

Is it true, then to say that any situation where one entity (person/animal/plant) is trying to change the behaviour of another entity is resolved either by control (forcing the change in behaviour) or persuasion (inspiring the change in behaviour), or a combination of the two (e.g. by tricking the entity into changing behaviour)?

Or is that too simplistic?

Rising bollards near Darwin College, Cambridge. A man was killed here in May 2006 when his car hit the right-hand bollard; see third photo below.

Many thanks to Steve Portigal and Josh for suggesting this subject!

Bollards which automatically retract into the road surface to allow certain vehicles to pass, and then rise again, are becoming increasingly common on public roads in the UK; whereas previously, they might have been used at the entrance to a private car park as a more visually appealing alternative to an automatic barrier, many authorities are now using them to enforce traffic control in urban areas, with the category of permitted vehicles including buses, emergency services, postal vans, and so on. (I’m not sure about taxis; I think this varies with city*). The recent compilation of CCTV clips by the Manchester Evening News (link via BoingBoing) showing ‘non-permitted’ cars and vans hitting rising bollards in Manchester, as the drivers try to follow close behind permitted vehicles has got a lot of attention, with reactions ranging from “stupid drivers deserve what they get” to “how is causing thousands of pounds’ worth of damage to punish a minor crime ever justifiable?” (There’s also this video showing a higher-speed crash – not sure if this is in Manchester too).

 
Stills from the CCTV compilation: the rear nearside wheel of the black 4×4 is off the ground. The van’s windscreen has been damaged by the driver’s head hitting it.

As an architecture of control, what can we say about the rising bollard? Is it merely a ‘restriction of access’ device, like a padlock? Or is it actually intended (to some extent at least) to damage the vehicles of non-permitted drivers, and injure them?

The official line would be the former, of course, but going by the dominance of the “stupid drivers deserve what they get” viewpoint in public comments on the Manchester video, I would suggest that a vindictive streak is pretty significant, and there’s no reason to think it might not also be among traffic planners.

The extensive (25 page) discussion at the road enthusiasts’ site SABRE also contains both points of view, and others. One logical argument which is well made, I think, is that if the drivers expected to damage their cars, they wouldn’t have tried to follow the buses. Therefore, the warning signs/road markings (knowledge in the world) or their prior experience of these systems (knowledge in the head) cannot have been sufficiently clear to discourage them from trying to sneak through. Yes, they knew that they “weren’t supposed to” drive through, and knew that buses were, so they tried to sneak in behind, but the drivers can’t have been fully aware of how quickly the bollards rose, or they wouldn’t have attempted it, would they? Most people don’t deliberately wreck their cars.

This is an important point. The system is not designed to be forgiving of mistakes. Now, we can say “well, why should it be? Those drivers shouldn’t try to break the law,” but in the real world, people do make mistakes. That’s why pencils have erasers. A car driver following a bus may have his or her vision of the warning signs obscured, and may be driving at a perfectly sensible speed, but still hit the risen bollards. A car driver following another car which externally looks like any other, but which is (for whatever reason) a permitted vehicle (with a transponder on board) may see the warning signs, and take them in, but, seeing the bollards lowered and the car in front driving at a constant speed, may assume that the bollards are disabled or permanently down, and so continue at exactly the same speed, and not be able to brake in time to avoid hitting the risen bollards. Bollards in some cities are only operational at certain times of day, and in certain directions; unless the warning signs themselves have a very clear variable display (Cambridge’s are fairly good), can we really expect drivers to read the times from the sign as they go past following another vehicle?

There are two much more sensible systems suggested in the SABRE discussion:

‘PeterA5145′

If this system is needed, then surely there should be conventional red lights with the bollards only rising a few seconds after the lights have changed to red (as with a level crossing). If you’ve never come across such a thing before it is not remotely obvious.

‘True Yorkie’

Perhaps a better idea would be to have a ‘vestibule’ system, with 2 bollards, spaced exactly a bus length apart. As the bus passed over the first lowered bollard, it’d stop immediately for the next bollard. As it waits for the second bollard to lower, the first would raise. Any car that tried to get in with the bus would have to shunt the bus to fit into the vestibule.

Either of these would be much better than the existing system. Both ‘design out’ the likelihood of mistakes – the vestibule system especially so.

The fatal accident at the Silver Street bollards in Cambridge (photo from Véro’s blog); this photo of the same bollards as my photo at the top of this post.

To a large extent this issue seems to come down to a debate on the old “if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to fear” argument. Again, it’s a subject for a future post** but I find the repeated use of this, by politicians especially, to justify every erosion of established freedoms, both sly and egregious: there’s a reason why I can’t legally shoot you if you walk up my garden path, or electrify my car body shell (OK, it’s fibreglass, in fact, but the same principle applies). Perhaps the “if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to fear” brigade would let happily let the authorities read all their personal correspondence, and indeed would be happy to have all private property covered in mantraps and landmines to enforce “trespass prevention”? After all, “if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to fear.”

Jeremy Wagstaff applies this kind of thinking to the bollard issue to demonstrate its absurdity, and its distasteful corollary:

My tuppenny’s worth: I think traffic maiming (as opposed to traffic calming) is a great idea but doesn’t go far enough. We need similar measures to punish, sorry deter, drivers who routinely flout the law and common decency. Why not, for example, deploy the retractable bollards elsewhere, like

* the centre of a restricted parking space, so it would rise at the end of the designated period, impaling the vehicle if the driver had overstayed his alloted time;
* at random points on the hard shoulder on toll roads/motorways so that cars illegally using it as a fast lane would be impaled, or flipped over into an adjacent field

Where necessary, bollards could be replaced by other features such as

* a mechanical arm, installed on the roadside and connected to a speed sensor, which would crush cars passing by too fast or too slow, depending on what irritated other drivers the most.
* or cars driving through built-up areas too fast would be taken out by snipers deployed in trees/tall buildings. If necessary the snipers could be automated.
* cars straddling two lanes or changing lanes without indicating first would be sliced in half by retractable blades intermittently rising out of the demarcating lines
* motorbikes using the sidewalk (a particular bane in my neck of the woods) would risk having their tyres slashed by strips of spikes activated by the annoying sound of approaching underpowered Chinese-made engines.

Norms, restriction and punishment

It’s worth thinking about the norms of restrictions and warnings we encounter in everyday life.

Many – in fact most – signs indicating the prohibition of particular behaviour do not suggest immediate punishment to us. The sign may say “Do not drop litter” but most people who do drop litter know that unless someone is watching, and decides to do something about it, they will get away with it. A road sign may say ‘No Parking”, but if no-one’s around, is it wrong to stop? Is it a crime if no-one finds out, and it doesn’t affect anyone?

We can laugh about falling trees in the forest and Schrödinger’s cat, but I think that for most of us, there is a very clear mental distinction between “incorrect” behaviour which we know will be “punished” immediately by the realities of the system (e.g. pointing a gun at our face and pulling the trigger, or driving through a level crossing barrier when a train is coming), and “incorrect” behaviour which we know is technically wrong, but which only the fear of being caught (and punished) stops us doing. Most drivers speed, but they wouldn’t speed if they knew there was a police car behind them.

So, our mental model of a ‘No Entry’ sign is that it signifies an arbitrary restriction, but one which carries no immediate punishment, unless, say, it’s a single-track road and something’s coming towards us at speed. If we ignore the sign, we might find we’re going the wrong way down a one-way street, or we might get caught (by camera or by police on the ground), but that’s a risk that people may take if they perceive it to be very low. If we can see that it’s not a one-way street, and we can see other vehicles passing that way, then there is apparently a fairly low risk to ignoring it. Our expectation is that we will get away with it.

When bollards then rise out of the road immediately in front of us, our mental model is proved wrong. The norm is shattered. This is a system that immediately punishes those who infringe the No Entry sign. This is a familiar, apparently docile ‘Keep off the grass’ sign accompanied by snipers watching very carefully.

Now, the UK’s Department for Transport clearly recognises something along these lines: the norms of the bollard systems are different to those drivers may have come to expect, and an additional aspect is also identified: that of the “control of all vehicles/control of individual vehicles” distinction:

Established practices of traffic control using traffic signals do not control separate vehicles; streams of vehicles are controlled with drivers able to see the signals from a significant distance. Rising bollards are normally used to control individual vehicles in that they are raised each time a vehicle has passed over them. The requirement, therefore, is for short range signalling… Unless drivers have a clear view of the bollards, an indication should be given to drivers that the bollards have fully retracted.

In conjunction with the vestibule system suggested in the SABRE quote above, that seems the most sensible approach to take. The DfT also has some other sensible guidelines:

Three wheeled vehicles, motorcycles and vehicles with trailers, for example, may not be sensed by the vehicle detectors used with automatic bollard systems. It will almost certainly be necessary to provide alternative means of access for some classes of road users or vehicles. The possibility of a device rising under a wheelchair or pushchair should be taken into account. The risks could be mitigated to some extent by providing suitable alternative access adjacent to the bollards, and by using a coarse road surface to divert pedestrians away from the bollard installation [interesting! - see also the pebble paving to make barefoot walking uncomfortable, mentioned here]. Whilst most applications will be to enable the passage of one vehicle at a time, there will be instances where two or more vehicles attempt to pass through in close succession. The system should ensure that bollards cannot rise beneath a vehicle because of the danger this would create. It is better to risk a certain amount of violation by “tailgating” vehicles, rather that put road users at risk. Any system, however well designed, will fail to operate correctly on occasions. The system should fail to a safe state, ideally with the bollards retracted. In the event if an accident the emergency services may need to override the control system and retract the bollards.

Still, for all the effort (and costs) involved in installing and running the bollard systems, would it really not be better to look at the subject from a greater distance? The roads drivers want to use are in many cases roads which used to be open to all traffic – indeed, in Cambridge, Silver Street used to be one of the main routes into the city centre, part of the old A603 from Bedford. The current alternative route from west to east is significantly longer and almost always very congested. It passed close outside my window when I was a student; I know. It’s understandable in many cases why drivers want to use the old route.

The real issue that needs to be addressed is why people want to drive into these areas. There is always a reason; people are rarely “stupid” with no explanation.

*I’d like to get into the “are taxis public transport?” debate another time: not now though.
**There was a quite astonishing article I read about a year ago where a police chief in a small US town had (seriously?) suggested putting CCTV inside every home in the community, for constant monitoring, and used the same “if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to fear” argument; if I can find this again, I’ll post the link.

These ‘pinch point’ barriers at London’s Heathrow Airport prevent the baggage trolleys from the Bus Station being taken down the escalators which lead to Terminals 1, 2 and 3. Mistake-proofing (for safety reasons: a trolley down the escalator would be dangerous) but also unnecessary if the airport had been designed differently from the start. Is forcing users to load baggage on and off multiple trolleys whenever their path descends or ascends really desirable? A lift (elevator) may be available, but how many people – and their trolleys – can fit in it at once?

An inclined travelator (as used elsewhere at Heathrow) would be a better solution.