Invention :: Architectures of Control

Some thoughts on classifications

Published October 3rd, 2007 in Architectures of Control, Civil rights, Consumer rights, Control, Design, Design attitudes, Design philosophy, Do artifacts have politics?, Embedding code, Engineering design, Environmental, Innovation, Intrusive technology, Invention, PhD, Philosophy of control, Political design, Social engineering, Sustainability, TRIZ, Technology, Technology policy and User experience. 2 Comments

Over the last couple of years, this site has examined, mentioned, discussed or suggested around 250 examples of ‘control’ features or methods designed into products, systems and environments - many of which have come from readers’ suggestions and comments on earlier posts. I’d resisted classifying them too much, since my original attempt wasn’t entirely satisfactory, and it seemed as though it might be better to amass a large quantity of examples and then see what emerged, rather than try to fit every example into a pre-defined framework.

As I start work on the PhD, though, it becomes more important to formalise, to some extent, the characteristics of the different examples, in order to identify trends and common intentions (and solutions) across different fields. My thinking is that while the specific strategy behind each example may be completely disparate, there are, on some levels, commonalities of intention.

Abstracting to the general…

For example, paving an area with pebbles to make it uncomfortable for barefoot protesters to congregate - U Texas, Austin and a system which curtails a targeted individual’s mobility by remotely disabling a public transport pay-card have very different specific strategies, but the overall intention in both cases is to restrict access based on some characteristic of the user, whether it’s bare feet or some data field in an ID system. In one case the intended ’strength’ of the method is fairly weak (it’s more about discouragement); in the other the intended strength is high: this individual’s freedom must be curtailed, and attempted circumvention must be detected.

In the case of the pebbles, we might describe the method as something like “Change of material or surface texture or characteristic”, which would also apply to, for example, rumble strips on a road; the method of disabling the pay-card might be described as “Authentication-based function lockout”, which could also describe, say, a padlock, at least on the level of keyholder authentication rather than actual identity verification. (Note, though, that the rumble strip example doesn’t match the access-restriction intention, instead being about making users aware of their speed. Similar methods can be used to achieve different aims.)

…and back to the specific again

Of course, this process of abstracting from the specific example (with a specific strategy) to a general principle (both intention, and method) can then be reversed, but with a different specific strategy in mind. The actual specific strategy is independent of the general principle. Readers familiar with TRIZ will recognise this approach - from this article on the TRIZ Journal website:

TRIZ research began with the hypothesis that there are universal principles of creativity that are the basis for creative innovations that advance technology. If these principles could be identified and codified, they could be taught to people to make the process of creativity more predictable. The short version of this is:

Somebody someplace has already solved this problem (or one very similar to it.)
Creativity is now finding that solution and adapting it to this particular problem.

…

Much of the practice of TRIZ consists of learning these repeating patterns of problems-solutions, patterns of technical evolution and methods of using scientific effects, and then applying the general TRIZ patterns to the specific situation that confronts the developer.

So, following on from the above examples, where else is restricting access based on some characteristic of the user ‘useful’ to some agency or other? (Clearly there are many instances where most readers will probably feel that restricting access in this way is very undesirable, and I agree.) But let’s say, from the point of view of encouraging / persuading / guiding / forcing users into more environmentally friendly behaviour (which is the focus of my PhD research), that it would be useful to use some characteristic of a user to restrict or allow access to something which might cause unnecessary environmental impact.

An in-car monitoring system could adjust the sensitivity (or the response curve) of the accelerator pedal so that a habitually heavy-footed driver’s fuel use is reduced, whilst not affecting someone who usually drives economically anyway. (A persuasive, rather than controlling alternative would be a system which monitors driver behaviour over time and gives feedback on how to improve economy, such as the Foot-LITE being developed at Brunel by Dr Mark Young). Or perhaps a householder who throws away a lot of rubbish one week (which is recorded by the bin) is prevented from throwing away as much the next week - each taxpayer is given a certain allocation of rubbish per year, and this is enforced by an extension of the ‘bin-top spy’ already being introduced to prevent the bin being opened once the limit has been reached (OK, cue massive fly-tipping: it’s not a good idea - but you can bet someone, somewhere, has thought of it).

Both of the above ‘control’ examples strike me as technical overkill, unnecessarily intrusive and unnecessarily coercive, but thinking on a simpler level and extending the ‘characteristic of the user’ parameter to include characteristics of an object borne by the user (such as the key mentioned earlier), we might include everything from the circular slots and flaps on bottle banks (which make it more difficult to put other types of rubbish in - restricting access based on a characteristic of what the user’s trying to put in it), to narrower parking spaces or physical width restrictions to prevent (or discourage) wider vehicles (such as 4×4s) from being used in city centres.

At this stage, these thoughts are fairly undeveloped, and I’m sure the methods of classification will evolve and mature, but even writing a post such as this helps to clarify the ideas in my mind. The real test of any system such as this is whether it can be used to suggest or generate worthwhile new ideas, and so far I haven’t reached this level.

Plug: Wilson Brothers’ blog

Published March 5th, 2007 in Bicycles, Blogosphere, Design, Designers, Fulminate, Graphic design, Invention, London and Product design. 0 Comments

Bit of a design-related plug: London designer/maker Ben Wilson (with whom I’m currently working on a project for Sir Clive Sinclair) and his brothers, Oscar and Luke, have just launched their own collaborative photo blog, which I helped set up using Wordpress.com, a mildly modified Sandbox theme and automatic email-to-blog (via Flickr) to allow the simplest method of photoblogging I could think of.

Between them the Wilson brothers take a lot of great photos of interesting and inspirational design, places, vehicles and people, as well as chronicling their own projects, and I think the blog’s going to get quite a bit of attention. The blog’s starting with a look at the building of a one-off bike commissioned by Nike (shown above), with some extraordinary detailing (cut leather decals and intricate stainless steel lugs).

Friday quote: Precedents (the flipside)

Published February 16th, 2007 in Convention, Design, Design philosophy, Friday quote, Fulminate, Independence, Innovation, Invention, Norms and Vague rhetoric. 1 Comment

'The Briton' door closer.

As a flipside, perhaps, to the quote on precedents from a couple of weeks ago:

If there is something really cool, and you can’t understand why somebody hasn’t done it before, it’s because you haven’t done it yourself.

(From Lion Kimbro’s fascinating How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think.)

The way I interpret that is that every previous person who has come up with the idea has been dissuaded by the same thought, viz. ‘Why hasn’t anyone done that before?’ and thus this is the problem.

When you come up with an idea, whether as a designer, engineer, scientist, thinker, writer, programmer, educator, anything, two of the biggest objections you’ll face are:

a) I bet that’s not original. Therefore, it’s no good.
b) Why hasn’t anyone done that before? It can’t be any good.

But in an abstract sense, we shouldn’t be put off by the existence or non-existence of precedents. It can be useful to learn from others’ success (and failures), of course, but independent thought and development (even if unknowingly following others’ work) so often seem to be at the heart of genuine progress.

Image: ‘The Briton’ door closer, from an era when it was considered worth branding and having pride in the design of a product such as this.

Shaping behaviour: Part 2

Published January 10th, 2007 in Architectures of Control, Consumer rights, Control, Design, Design philosophy, Designers, Do artifacts have politics?, Education, Engineering, Entropy, Environmental, Everyware, Forcing functions, Future, Gadgets, Good design, Health and safety, Hidden persuaders, Indoctrination, Innovation, Interaction design, Invention, Marketing, Mistake-proofing, Motoring, Norms, Observation, Pervasive computing, Philosophy of control, Political design, Product design, Social engineering, Speed control, Surveillance, Techniques of persuasion, Technology, Technology policy, Ubiquitous computing, User Psychology, User experience, Vague rhetoric, Worldwide and Your property. 8 Comments

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 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?

Limiting frequency of cigarette use

Published December 30th, 2006 in Addiction, Arbitrary, Architectures of Control, Business model, Cargo cult, Control, Design, Design philosophy, Do artifacts have politics?, Fightback Devices, Forcing functions, Gadgets, Health and safety, Hidden persuaders, Interaction design, Invention, Parasitic lock-in, Political design, Product design, Razor blade model, Techniques of persuasion and User Psychology. 3 Comments

Nicostopper - image from Nicostopper.com
Images from nicostopper.com and Popgadget

Nicostopper is an electronic dispenser which holds up to 10 cigarettes, and releases them one at a time at programmed intervals, to help pace and restrict the smoker. The screen “will also flash “self-help” messages each time to make you feel guilty as well” (Popgadget). It’s styled fairly discreetly to look similar to a portable music player or phone - the resemblance is accentuated in the photo above right with the extended cigarette in the position of the aerial - presumably so the user will be more likely to feel at home using it in public and social situations.

This is an interesting product, attempting to affect a user’s behaviour to reduce consumption rather than increase it as with so many other architectures of control. Indeed, smoking could well be seen as a battle between two attempts to control/influence users’ behaviour, with vast sums spent on advertising and methods both to promote the practice, and to encourage smokers to give up. We’ve looked before at cigarettes as a parasitic lock-in method, especially in the context of increasing nicotine levels to compound addiction*.

Of course, a device such as Nicostopper does not stop the user asking a friend or someone else for a cigarette, nor indeed taking a full packet along in addition. The actual strength of control is fairly low. The user really must want to control his or her habit, and be determined to do so, otherwise there is no point in buying the device. Even the significant commitment shown by buying Nicostopper, and the expense of it, may help the user to take more control of the situation, and there’s also the factor that, as Uber Review puts it:

If that doesn’t stop you from smoking at least you will have $300 less to spend on smokes after you pay for the device.

I recently mentioned Lee Iacocca’s quote on rationalising major purchases - to the extent that spending $300 on a Nicostopper is a major purchase, this may increase its effectiveness, at least for the first few months, since the user feels guilty about spending $300 on the product, and is thus more committed actually to using it, even if only to justify it to friends and family. Like exercise bikes and home gym equipment abandoned a few months after Christmas, the Nicostopper may ultimately fail in a large percentage of users’ attempts to change their own behaviour, but will surely succeed in some cases.

Interestingly, Ross Anderson comments, at Popgadget:

I distinctly remember hearing, about 30 years ago, that the then Soviet ruler Leonid Brezhnev owned such a device that had been specially built to his specifications.

This is confirmed here by John Negroponte…

He had a problem with his smoking. I remember he couldn’t control smoking either, he had a little machine, little cigarette box, with a timer on it that was only allowed to open every so many minutes, so that he wouldn’t smoke to many cigarettes.

…and also in this Time story from 1971:

Brezhnev customarily works late at the Kremlin, sometimes has difficulty sleeping without a sedative. To cut down on his smoking, he is trying a time-lock cigarette case (made in France, he thinks) which opens only after a preset number of minutes or hours has passed. “Yesterday,” Brezhnev told L’Humanité, “I smoked only 17 cigarettes.”

Of course, simply having a smaller standard cigarette case with space for only a few cigarettes might have much the same effect as devices with timers, etc. As with packaging/serving sizes, the quantity which we expect to consume can be affected by the way it’s presented. Maybe smaller cigarettes - getting a little bit smaller each year - would have a gradual effect of lessening dependence on the chemical content of the product, but not on the physical addiction to picking up a cigarette, lighting it, etc.

*As my brother commented, tobacco companies may increase the nicotine, but they don’t increase the tar: a parasite doesn’t want to kill its host.

About this blog | Blog archives

What are Architectures of Control?

Audi A2 : The user cannot open the bonnet; Bench designed to prevent lying down: 'redesigned to face contemporary urban realities'; Some HP printers shut down the cartridges at a pre-determined date regardless of whether they are empty

Increasingly, many products are being designed with features that intentionally restrict the way the user can behave, or enforce certain modes of behaviour. The same intentions are also evident in the design of many systems and environments.

This site aims—with readers’ input—to examine and analyse the ideas and techniques of these architectures of control in design, through examples and anecdotes, and by keeping up-to-date with relevant developments... More