Design with Intent | Panopticon

BBC: Surveillance drones in Merseyside

By Dan Lockton ⋅ October 17, 2006 ⋅ 5 comments

From the BBC: ‘Police play down spy planes idea’:
“Merseyside Police’s new anti-social behaviour (ASB) task force is exploring a number of technology-driven ideas.
But while the use of surveillance drones is among them, they would be a “long way off”, police said.
…
“The idea of the drone is a long way off, but it is about exploring [...]

Reversing the emphasis of a control environment

By Dan Lockton ⋅ October 17, 2006 ⋅ Post a comment

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 [...]

Review: Made to Break by Giles Slade

By Dan Lockton ⋅ October 8, 2006 ⋅ 5 comments

Last month I mentioned some fascinating details on planned obsolescence gleaned from a review of Giles Slade’s Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America. Having now read the book for myself, here’s my review, including noteworthy ‘architectures of control’ examples and pertinent commentary.
Slade examines the phenomenon of obsolescence in products from the early 20th [...]

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 [...]

Countercontrol: blind pilots

By Dan Lockton ⋅ September 28, 2006 ⋅ 2 comments

In a recent post, I discussed a Spiked article by Josie Appleton which included the following quote:
“Police in Weston-super-Mare have been shining bright halogen lights from helicopters on to youths gathered in parks and other public places. The light temporarily blinds them, and is intended to ‘move them on’, in the words of one [...]

Transcranial magnetic stimulation

By Dan Lockton ⋅ September 7, 2006 ⋅ 6 comments

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

By Dan Lockton ⋅ September 1, 2006 ⋅ Post a comment

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?

By Dan Lockton ⋅ August 30, 2006 ⋅ One comment

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’

By Dan Lockton ⋅ August 25, 2006 ⋅ 2 comments

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.

Dilemma of horns

By Dan Lockton ⋅ August 25, 2006 ⋅ Post a comment

I was woken up (along with, I expect, lots of others) at about 5am today by a driver sounding his/her horn in the road outside – an arrogant two-second burst – then another replying (perhaps) with a slightly feeble one-second tone. I don’t know why; there are often a lot of horns during the day [...]

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