Some interesting projects (Part 1)

I’ve come across some interesting student projects at various shows and exhibitions this summer, some of which address the relationship between design and people’s behaviour in different situations, and some of which explicitly aim to influence what people do and think. Here’s a selection (Part 2 and Part 3 will follow).

Jasmine Cox’s Displacement Engine (Dundee) [...]

Making energy use visible

Photos courtesy of Harry Ward
We’ve looked recently at water taps with meters built in, the thinking being the ’speedometer’ approach to shaping users’ behaviour – making users aware of the scale/rate/level of some activity should cause them to adjust that behaviour.
A number of projects and initiatives also apply this approach to electricity use – [...]

Smile, you’re on Countermanded Camera

Image from Miquel Mora’s website
We’ve looked before at a number of technologies and products aimed at ‘preventing’ photography and image recording in some way, from censoring photographs of ‘copyrighted content’ and banknotes, to Georgia Tech’s CCD-flooding system.
Usually these systems are about locking out the public, or removing freedoms in some way (a lot of [...]

Shaping behaviour: Part 2

Speedometer, rev counter and fuel and temperature gauges on the dashboard of my 1992 Reliant Scimitar SST. Photo taken on B1098 alongside Sixteen Foot Drain, Isle of Ely, England.
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 [...]

Reversing the emphasis of a control environment

Image from Monkeys & Kiwis (Flickr)
Chris Weightman let me know about how it felt to watch last Thursday’s iPod Flashmob at London’s Liverpool Street station: the dominant sense was of a mass of people overturning the ‘prescribed’ behaviour designed into an environment, and turning the area into their own canvas, overlaying individualised, externally silent experiences [...]

Transcranial magnetic stimulation

An image from Hendricus Loos’s 2001 US patent, ‘Remote Magnetic Manipulation of Nervous Systems’
In my review of Adam Greenfield’s Everyware a couple of months ago, I mentioned – briefly – the work of Hendricus Loos, whose series of patents cover subjects including “Manipulation of nervous systems by electric fields”, “Subliminal acoustic manipulation of nervous systems”, [...]

Some links: miscellaneous, pertinent to architectures of control

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

Spiked: When did ‘hanging around’ become a social problem?

Josie Appleton, at the always-interesting Spiked, takes a look at the increasing systemic hostility towards ‘young people in public places’ in the UK: ‘When did ‘hanging around’ become a social problem?’
As well as the Mosquito, much covered on this site (all posts; try out high frequency sounds for yourself), the article mentions the use [...]

‘Carmakers must tell buyers about black boxes’

According to Reuters,
“The [US] government will not require recorders in autos but said on Monday that car makers must tell consumers when technology that tracks speed, braking and other measurements is in the new vehicles they buy.

The Privacy Ceiling

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