Design with Intent | Internet economics

Swoopo: Irrational escalation of commitment

By Dan Lockton ⋅ October 2, 2008 ⋅ 27 comments

Swoopo, a new kind of “entertainment shopping” auction site, takes Martin Shubik’s classic Dollar Auction game to a whole new, automated, mass participation level. It’s an example of the escalation of commitment, or a sunk cost fallacy, where we increase our commitment (in this case with real money) even though (in this case) most users’ [...]

Pretty Cuil Privacy

By Dan Lockton ⋅ July 28, 2008 ⋅ 4 comments

New search engine Cuil has an interesting privacy policy (those links might not work right now due to the load). They’re apparently not going to track individual users’ searches at all, which, in comparison to Google’s behaviour, is quite a difference. As TechCrunch puts it:
User IP addresses are not recorded to their servers, they say, [...]

Apologies for the delay to this service

By Dan Lockton ⋅ April 22, 2008 ⋅ 4 comments

You’re owed an apology, dear reader, for the 2-month hiatus with the blog. It’s down to a variety of reasons compounding each other, and alternately forcing me to prioritise other pressing problems, then when I tried seizing the initiative again, frustrating me with technical issues and actually preventing posting. You probably never noticed it, due [...]

Digital control round-up

By Dan Lockton ⋅ February 11, 2008 ⋅ One comment

Mac as a giant dongle
At Coding Horror, Jeff Atwood makes an interesting point about Apple’s lock-in business model:
It’s almost first party only– about as close as you can get to a console platform and still call yourself a computer… when you buy a new Mac, you’re buying a giant hardware dongle that allows you [...]

Slanty design

By Dan Lockton ⋅ October 29, 2007 ⋅ 5 comments

The Main Reading Room, Library of Congress. Image from CIRLA.
In this article from Communications of the ACM from January 2007, Russell Beale uses the term slanty design to describe “design that purposely reduces aspects of functionality or usability”:
It originated from an apocryphal story that some desks in the US Library of Congress in Washington, DC, [...]

The future of academic exposure?

By Dan Lockton ⋅ October 10, 2007 ⋅ 3 comments

A lot of research is published each year.
Now that I’m a student again, I’ve got access (via Athens) to a vastly increased amount of academic journals, papers and so on. Far more than I could have done ‘legitimately’ without that Athens login, aside from travelling from library to library to library. And while it’s good [...]

Persuasion & control round-up

By Dan Lockton ⋅ October 10, 2007 ⋅ 6 comments

New Scientist: Recruiting Smell for the Hard Sell
Samsung’s coercive atmospherics strategy involves the smell of honeydew melon:
THE AIR in Samsung’s flagship electronics store on the upper west side of Manhattan smells like honeydew melon. It is barely perceptible but, together with the soft, constantly morphing light scheme, the scent gives the store a blissfully relaxed, [...]

Bye-bye 9rules

By Dan Lockton ⋅ October 5, 2007 ⋅ 17 comments

Around ten months ago, this site was accepted into 9rules, a diverse network of blogs which, at the time, had this aim:
9rules is a community of the best weblogs in the world on a variety of topics. We started 9rules to give passionate writers more exposure and to help readers find great blogs on their [...]

Friday quote: Fashion & convention

By Dan Lockton ⋅ February 9, 2007 ⋅ One comment

L.J.K. Setright, the late motoring writer and commentator, self-taught mechanical engineer and all-round Renaissance Man, once wrote:
Fashion is a terrible fetter; convention, since it lasts longer, is even worse.
This was in an issue of Car, when it was still any good.
Setright wrote it in reference to car design, and the lack of [...]

Coincidence?

By Dan Lockton ⋅ January 10, 2007 ⋅ 12 comments

A few minutes ago I was playing a track in Winamp, with Gmail open in an Opera window, and on refreshing Gmail, the Google ‘web clip’ at the top of the inbox display contained the same phrase, ‘jet stream’, as the track.
Is that merely a coincidence, or does Gmail monitor what music is being played [...]

Search

Internet economics