Design with Intent | Entertainment

Thoughts on the ‘fun theory’

By Dan Lockton ⋅ November 3, 2009 ⋅ 5 comments

The ‘Piano Staircase’ from Volkswagen’s thefuntheory.com
The Fun Theory (Rolighetsteorin), a competition / campaign / initiative from Volkswagen Sweden – created by DDB Stockholm – has been getting a lot of attention in the last couple of weeks from both design-related people and other commentators with an interest in influencing behaviour: it presents a series of [...]

Cialdini on the Beach

By Dan Lockton ⋅ July 10, 2009 ⋅ 3 comments

Self-monitoring is one of the most common persuasive techniques used in interface design: basically, giving people feedback on what they’re doing and what they’ve done. There are lots of issues about which kinds of feedback work best, in what circumstances, pairing it with feedforward, i.e. ‘What would happen if I did this?’ information, and so [...]

Cleaning up with carpets

By Dan Lockton ⋅ July 31, 2007 ⋅ 10 comments

Following the recent post looking at aspects of casino and slot machine design, in which I quoted William Choi and Antoine Sindhu’s study – “[Casino] carpeting is often purposefully jarring to the eyes, which draws customers’ gaze upwards toward the machines on the gambling floor” – Max Rangeley sends me a link to the Total [...]

Learned down the gambling house

By Dan Lockton ⋅ July 20, 2007 ⋅ 2 comments

Michael Shanks’ Ten Things class at Stanford – which looks like a brilliant application of anthropological and archaeological thinking to design and technology – generated a very interesting project by William Choi and Antoine Sindhu analysing the architectures of control (psychological and physical) designed into both slot machines, and casinos themselves.
Slot machines
From ‘The psychology of [...]

The Terminal Bench

By Dan Lockton ⋅ July 6, 2007 ⋅ 19 comments

Mags L Halliday – author of the Doctor Who novel History 101 – let me know about an ‘interesting’ design tactic being used at Heathrow’s Terminal 5. From the Guardian, by Julia Finch:
Flying from the new Heathrow Terminal 5 and facing a lengthy delay? No worries. Take a seat and enjoy the spectacular views through [...]

Making exercise cooler

By Dan Lockton ⋅ July 5, 2007 ⋅ Post a comment

Main image and above right: Snowdown aesthetic model; below right: Snowdown functional test rig prototype.
Snowdown, by Matthew Barnett, is fantastic. Powered by a child exercising, moving the handle, it crushes ice cubes and compacts them to make snowballs. There are a lot of kids out there who would very much like one of these, at [...]

More educational architectures of control: museums

By Dan Lockton ⋅ January 30, 2007 ⋅ 4 comments

A ‘traditional’ museum display cabinet in the Kremlin museum, Moscow. I liked the owl.
Two very interesting posts from last week looked at the use of control in museum design – Frankie Roberto discusses trying to get children (in particular) to learn interactively, and Josh Clark has some thoughts on the way that museum and gallery [...]

Splitting up articles to increase page views

By Dan Lockton ⋅ October 10, 2006 ⋅ 23 comments

Jason Kottke notes the now-near universal practice of splitting newspaper & magazine articles online into multiple pages:
“…it’s some sort of “best practice” that we readers let them get away with so they can boost pageviews and advertising revenue at the expense of user experience, but The New Yorker was the last bastion of good behavior [...]

Casino programmable*

By Dan Lockton ⋅ October 5, 2006 ⋅ 2 comments

Signal vs Noise talks about the casino experience – a world awash with designed-in architectures of control, both physical and psychological (and physiological, perhaps), truly environments designed specifically to manipulate and reinforce certain behaviour, from maze-like layouts (intentional route obfuscation – perhaps even more so than in supermarkets) to the deliberate funnelling of winners past [...]

‘Secret alarm becomes dance track’

By Dan Lockton ⋅ September 28, 2006 ⋅ Post a comment

The Mosquito sound has been mixed (sort of) into a dance track:
“…the sound is being used in a dance track, Buzzin’, with secret melodies only young ears can hear.
…
Simon Morris from Compound Security said: “Following the success of the ringtone, a lot of people were asking us to do a bit more, so we [...]

Search

Entertainment