Exclusion :: Architectures of Control

Mosquito controversy goes high-profile

Published February 13th, 2008 in Arbitrary, Architectures of Control, Audio, Britain, Built Environment, Children, Civil rights, Creeping erosion of norms, Crime, Design, Design philosophy, Designed to be unpleasant, Discrimination, Discriminatory Architecture, Distasteful corollary, Do artifacts have politics?, Dystopia, Erosion of liberty, Exclusion, Intrusive technology, Liberty, Mosquito, Non-lethal weapons, Oppression, Orwellian, Philosophy of control, Political design, Ringtones, Social engineering, Sound weapons, Technology policy, Teenagers, Underclass and Urban. 10 Comments

The Mosquito anti-teenager sound device, which we’ve covered on this site a few times, was yesterday heavily criticised by the Children’s Commissioner for England, Sir Albert Aynsley-Green, launching the BUZZ OFF campaign in conjunction with Liberty and the National Youth Agency:

Makers and users of ultra-sonic dispersal devices are being told to “Buzz Off” today by campaigners who say the device, which emits a high-pitched sound that targets under 25 year olds, is not a fair or reasonable solution for tackling anti-social behaviour. The campaign… is calling for the end to the use of ultra-sonic dispersal device. There are estimated to be 3,500 used across the country.

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Normalising paranoia

Published July 27th, 2007 in 1984, Architectures of Control, Art making a point, Cargo cult, Censorship, Civil rights, Communication, Creeping erosion of norms, Design, Design philosophy, Designers, Do artifacts have politics?, Exclusion, Fightback Devices, Future, Graphic design, Hidden persuaders, Indoctrination, Liberty, Observation, Panopticon, Political design, Propaganda, Social engineering, Sousveillance, Techniques of persuasion, User Psychology, Vague rhetoric and advertising. 11 Comments

This is brilliant. Chloë Coulson, Erland Banggren and Ben Williams, three Ravensbourne graduates, have put together a project looking at the “culture of fear”, the media’s use of this, and how it affects our everyday state of mind.

The outcome is a catalogue, WellBeings™ [PDF link] accompanying a specially printed newspaper, The Messenger, designed to be used with special rose-tinted spectacles - simple, yet very clever:

Feeling brave? Read the paper as usual. Feeling fragile? Put on the rose-tinted spectacles to block out the bad news stories which are printed in the same hue as the lenses so it becomes invisible.

The products in the catalogue cater for people made increasingly paranoid by aspects of modern society, by ‘normalising’ paranoia - ranging from H-ear-Phones which allow you to hear what others are saying about you, to Rear-View Mirror spectacles to allow you to keep an eye on who might be following you. As Chloë puts it:

The whole project is about questioning attitudes - should we live in fear - are we safer that way, or should we live for now and not worry about what could happen.

There are also a couple of products in there which are actually defensive weapons - a pepper spray disguised as a perfume atomiser, and house-key-cum-knuckleduster, and these seem to go beyond mere paranoia. All of these products are very plausible, and indeed, some of them are probably commercially viable. Whilst none of these is an architecture of control as such, I felt that they deserved inclusion here - pertinent to the sousveillance discussion, and also the idea of users turning products against instrusive aspects of society, from relatively simple items such as the Knee Defender (prevent the person in front of you on an aircraft reclining his or her seat) to Limor Fried’s Design Noir work on using electronic devices to create social defence mechanisms.

Equally - while perhaps not the focus of the project - the rose-tinted spectacles idea parallels closely the phenomenon of increasing self-selection of the news we expose ourselves to, as the internet and hundreds of TV channels allow segmentation like never before. The idea of a newspaper bringing readers only ‘good’ news has been tried a number of times (a recent example one-off) and has inspired some interesting pieces, but modern media permits many more coloured filters than simply rose-tinting. Clearly, to a large extent, deliberate use of this segmentation can permit intentional reinforcement, entrenchment, even inspiration of certain views and behaviours. Self-selected exposure to propaganda is a curious phenomenon, but one with enormous power.

West Coast code meets Far East code

Published March 5th, 2007 in 1984, Architectures of Control, Blogosphere, Bureaucracy, Censorship, China, Civil rights, Communication, Control, Do artifacts have politics?, Exclusion, Hidden persuaders, Indoctrination, Intrusive technology, Orwellian, Political design, Privacy, Propaganda, Regulation, Restriction, Social engineering, Surveillance, Technology policy and Worldwide. 5 Comments

Thanks to Mr Person at Text Savvy, I’ve just learned that this blog is blocked in China:

Images from the Great Firewall of China test.

I don’t know if that’s good or bad. From a censorship point of view, it’s bad, but it’s certainly interesting to be able to say that the blog’s blocked in China, even if it’s just for a rather prosaic reason (using Wordpress?) as Mr Person suggests, and not the incendiary demagoguery contained within these posts and comments.

(Additionally interesting is that as the whole of danlockton.co.uk seems to be blocked, I might not have any more of my portfolio items appearing on Chinese design sites. One site even had me listed alongside Karim Rashid for a while, which was odd and flattering, perhaps, though I don’t think he’ll be losing sleep over it!)

37signals: Control vs Communication

Published February 16th, 2007 in Architectures of Control, Bureaucracy, Communication, Control, Design, Design philosophy, Discriminatory Architecture, Exclusion, Interaction design, Philosophy of control, Restriction, Software, Technology policy, Usability and User experience. 1 Comment

Johan Strandell kindly lets me know about a discussion of ‘Control vs Communication‘ at 37signals’ Signal vs Noise:

Every once in a while we get an email from a customer asking about how permissions work with our products. They’re almost always asking how to prevent someone from doing something. “How do we prevent someone from posting a message or adding a to-do or downloading a file? How can we make our project site read only except for a select few?”

…

Simply communicating with people about your expectations of their behavior is often the simplest and most effective solution. It’s respectful, it’s kind, it’s fair. And if someone does something you didn’t want them to do just remind them politely that they weren’t supposed to do that. They’ll almost always get it the second time.

[N]ext time you are looking for more control, consider more communication. It may surprise you.

While the specific context of the discussion is setting permissions, etc, in the Basecamp collaboration software, some of the comments expand the scope to the idea of control and trust within organisations and in society generally - e.g. Neil Wilson comments:

Everybody always wants to try and control behaviour via technical means when by far the most powerful mechanism is via social means.

Useful terminat-ology

Published February 16th, 2007 in Architectures of Control, Britain, DRM, Exclusion, File formats, Forcing functions, Liberty, Lock-in, Norms, Razor blade model, Rent-seeking, Terminology, US and Worldwide. 3 Comments

Image from www.blackflag.com
Image from Black Flag website.

Sometimes there’s very useful terminology in one field, or culture, which allows clearer or more succinct explanation of concepts in another. In the UK we don’t have Roach Motels. There are doubtless similar products, but they don’t have such a snappy name, or one which can be repurposed so easily.

Reading about DRM, file format incompatability and lock-in, I’d come across the term a number of times without necessarily thinking through exactly what it meant when used in this way, not being familiar with the actual product. “You can check data in but you can’t check it out” (possibly in conjunction with some kind of superficially attractive bait) is a good explanation, derived from the actual slogan used on the front of the box. I’m assuming (possibly wrongly) that ‘roach motel’ isn’t especially familiar to most UK readers - do we have an equivalently neat alternative term? Are there equivalents in other languages?

37signals: Control vs Communication

Useful terminat-ology

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