Surveillance :: Architectures of Control

Towards a Design with Intent ‘Method’ - v.0.1

Published January 5th, 2008 in Architecture, Architectures of Control, Bad design, Benches, Built Environment, Design, Design attitudes, Design engineering, Design philosophy, Designed to be unpleasant, Designers, Discriminatory Architecture, Do artifacts have politics?, DwI Method, Erosion of liberty, Good design, Health and safety, Interaction design, PhD, Philosophy of control, Political design, Product design, Public money, Restriction, Sneaky, Social engineering, Spatial, Surveillance, Techniques of persuasion, Technology policy, Technology underclass, Underclass, Urban, User Psychology, User experience and Worldwide. 8 Comments

As mentioned a while back, I’ve been trying to find a way to classify the numerous ‘Design with Intent’ and architectures of control examples that have been examined on this site, and suggested by readers. Since that post, my approach has shifted slightly to look at what the intent is behind each example, and hence develop a kind of ‘method’ for suggesting ’solutions’ to ‘problems’, based on analysing hundreds of examples. I’d hesitate to call it a suggestion algorithm quite yet, but it does, in a very very rudimentary way, borrow certain ideas from TRIZ*. Below is a tentative, v.0.1 example of the kind of thought process that a ‘designer’ might be led through by using the DwI Method. I’ve deliberately chosen an common example where the usual architectures of control-type ’solutions’ are pretty objectionable. Other examples will follow.

Basics of the DwI Method, v.0.1

1. Assuming you have a ‘problem’ involving the interaction between one of more users, and a product, system or environment (hereafter, the system), the first stage is to express what your intended target behaviour is. What do you actually want to achieve?

2. Attempt to describe your intended target behaviour in terms of one of the general target behaviours for the interaction, listed in the table below. (This is, of course, very much a rough work in progress at present, and these will undoubtedly change and be added to.) Your intended target behaviour may seem to map to more than one general target behaviour: this may mean that you actually have two ‘problems’ to solve.

3. You’re presented with a set of mechanisms - loosely categorised as physical, psychological, economic, legal or structural - which, it’s suggested, could be applied to achieve the general target behaviour, and thus your intended target behaviour. Some mechanisms have a narrow focus - dealing specifically with the interaction between the user and the system - and some are much wider in scope - looking outside the immediate interaction. Different mechanisms can be combined, of course: the idea here is to inspire ’solutions’ to your ‘problem’ rather than actually specify them.

An example

This example is one that I’ve covered extensively on this blog: the most common ’solutions’ are, generally, very unfriendly, but it’s clear to most of us that the ‘wider scope’ mechanisms are, ultimately, more desirable.

Sleeping on a bench in Hyde Park, London. Photo by David Basanta

Introduction

A number of benches in a city-centre park are occupied overnight or during parts of the day by homeless people. The city council/authorities (’they’) decide that this is a problem: they don’t want homeless people sleeping on the benches in the park. Expressed differently, their intended target behaviour is no homeless people sleeping on the benches.

So, which of the general target behaviours is closest to this?

Currently the list (disclaimer: v.0.1, will change a lot, letter allocations are not significant) is:

A1: Access, use or occupation based on user characteristics
A2: Access, use or occupation based on user behaviour
B:   No access, use or occupation, in a specific manner, by any user
C:   User provided with functionality only when environmental criteria satisfied
D:   Separate flows and occupation; users have no influence on each other
E:   Interaction between users or groups of users
F:   No user-created blockages or congestion caused by multiple users
G:   Controlled rate of flow or passage of users
H:   User follows process or path
I:    User pays the maximum price which still results in a sale

While we might think the ‘discriminatory’ implications of A1 and A2 are relevant here given our assumptions about the authorities’ motives, in fact ‘they’ probably don’t want anyone sleeping on the benches, regardless of whether he or she’s actually homeless, just having a lunchtime nap before returning to a corner office at Goldman Sachs, or anywhere in between. They don’t mind someone sitting on the bench (grudgingly, that would seem to be its purpose), as long as it’s not for too long (that’s another ‘problem’, though with very similar ‘solutions’), but they don’t want anyone sleeping on it. It’s not exactly the same problem as preventing anyone lying down (we might imagine a bright light or loudspeaker positioned over the bench, which allows people to lie down but makes it difficult to sleep), but the problems, and most solutions, are very close.

So it turns out that B, ‘No access, use or occupation, in a specific manner, by any user’, best matches the intended target behaviour in this case:

From mechanisms to ’solutions’

Looking at the diagram (PDF, 25k, or click image below), a number of possible mechanisms are suggested to achieve this target behaviour. (Again, a disclaimer: this is very much work in progress, and many mechanisms are missing at this stage.) There are physical, psychological, economic, legal and structural mechanisms, some with a narrow focus, and some much wider in scope.

I’ll try to pick out and discuss a few mechanisms - physical, psychological and structural (leaving out the legal and economic for the moment) - to demonstrate how they can be applied in the context of the bench example, but first it’s important to note two things:

Different mechanisms can of course be combined to produce solutions: e.g. legal mechanisms would need some kind of surveillance, either human or technological, to enforce; a ‘stick‘ approach along with a ‘carrot’ may be more effective than simply one or the other. So a fine for interacting with the system (i.e. sleeping on the bench) would probably have more effect if combined with making the alternative more attractive, e.g. providing somewhere else for people to sleep.

None of these mechanisms is an actual ’solution’ to the ‘problem’ directly, and even if applied rigorously, the actual effectiveness in terms of physically forcing, psychologically encouraging, or otherwise enforcing the intended target behaviour is not guaranteed. Users are not mechanical components; nor are they all rational economically. Your results will vary.

The most obvious physical mechanism for addressing the issue is the placing of material - to interrupt the surface of the bench, or perhaps even to cause injury (usually not done deliberately with park benches, but surely done, at least in the sense of conditioning the user not to repeat the interactions, with some pigeon spikes, barbed wire, anti-climb and various anti-sit spikes).

Interrupting the surface of the bench is usually done by adding central armrests (which do at least serve another function in addition), as illustrated here:

A new bench with armrests being installed at Richmond Station, just as London Overground takes over from Silverlink; and the Belson Georgetown Bench, “Redesigned to face contemporary urban realities, this bench comes standard with a centre arm to discourage overnight stays in its comfortable embrace.”

Of course, it is possible to sleep on a bench with central armrests, but it’s certainly discouraging, as the Belson quote suggests.

Photo by Rick Abbott

Placing of material could equally be subtractive rather than additive - so interrupting the surface might also suggest removing elements to prevent or discourage sleeping. This could be in the form of removing every (say) third section of a bench, thus making the remaining length too short to lie down on properly (this has been done in some airport lounges), making the benches shorter altogether, or even separating the seats into ’single-occupancy benches’ - which would seem to be suggested by the spatial mechanism:

“A man tries to sleep on a deliberately shortened bench at the park” - photo from this excellent article by Yumiko Hayakawa discussing anti-homeless measures in Tokyo; ‘Single-occupancy benches’ in Helsinki - photo by Ville Tikkanen

Indeed, simply narrowing the bench (making a kind of perch), and/or removing the backrest from a bench which already has central armrests, so that someone can’t even lean back to doze, would also count in terms of removing material.

Designs suggested by the orientation of material mechanisms are also fairly common - most often, a simply angled seat surface, as used on many bus-stop perches or these benches:

“Can’t Lie Down, Can’t Lean Back - A man has a hard time getting a break on this partitioned, forward-leaning bench at Tokyo’s Ueno Onshi park”. Photo from Yumiko Hayakawa’s article.

The ‘Lean Seat’ by Joscelyn Bingham

Curved surfaces, both convex and concave, can also be employed:

Convex surface tubular bench in Tokyo - photo from Yumiko Hayakawa’s article; Concave surface bus shelter perch in Shanghai - photo by Albert Sun

And curvature can be combined with the use of armrests (and height - which suggests that spatial might also be expanded to include something like “dimensional change to alter distance between elements of system”) to create something like the ‘Oxford Cornmarket montrosity’, which might prevent people sleeping on it, but certainly doesn’t stop people occupying it in a way the designers didn’t intend:

The ‘benches’ in Oxford’s Cornmarket Street, discussed here and here. Second photo by Stephanie Jenkins

Looking at some of the other relevant physical mechanisms, it’s worth noting that change of environmental characteristic - ‘local temperature change’ - also finds an expression in the convex Tokyo bench pictured above - as Yumiko Hayakawa notes in the original article:

The hard curved surface of this stainless-steel bench, too hot in summer, too cold in winter, repels all but one visitor to Ikebukuro West Park.

We might also think of positioning a street lamp right above a bench - to make it took bright to sleep there easily at night - as a similar tactic in this vein, ‘local illumination change’.

What about the other relevant physical mechanisms? Change of material characteristic could mean a bench that deforms in some way when someone lies on it, or maybe has an uncomfortable surface texture (nails?). But both of these would probably preclude the bench’s use for sitting, in addition to sleeping. Movement or oscillation could suggest a bench which is balanced somehow so that it requires the user’s feet to be on the ground, in a normal sitting position, to keep it stable, and which would fall over (extra degree of freedom introduced) when someone tried to lie down on it, or maybe a bench which is sited on a turntable continually rotating, or a vibrating base, so that the user’s feet on the ground are again needed for stabilising, and someone lying down would fall off. None of these is an especially realistic ’solution’, but would all address the ‘problem’ even if simultaneously introducing others.

(At this point, we might consider that if the ‘problem’ mainly occurs at night, we might want a bench that only becomes un-sleepable on - or unusable - at night. This would be best addressed by general target behaviour C, ‘User provided with functionality only when environmental criteria satisfied’ - many of the suggested mechanisms will be similar, but with conditional elements to them - if it is dark, or after a certain time, the bench might automatically retract into the ground, or become uncomfortable, if it weren’t already.)

As noted on the diagram (PDF, 25k), I’ve (so far) had a bit of a mental blind-spot in coming up with wider-scope physical mechanisms to address this general target behaviour. The only sensible ones so far relate to applying the placing of material on the approach to the system, so in this case, it might mean putting the bench on an island surrounded by mud, water or spikes and so on, which doesn’t really seem useful. This wider-scope line-of-thinking needs much further development for some types of mechanisms, although it’s fairly obvious where it relates to making an alternative system more attractive.

Narrow-scope psychological mechanisms

Turning to psychological mechanisms, with both narrow and wider scopes, the emphasis pretty much comes down to a ’stick’ or ‘carrot’ approach: either scare/warn/otherwise put off the user from sleeping on the bench, or make an alternative more attractive/available. It’s about creating unattractive perceived affordances, perhaps, where the physical mechanisms are about removing real affordances.

From the narrow scope point-of-view, some of the applicable psychological ’solutions’ might include: ‘warning’ potential sleepers off with signage or colour schemes (not that this would do much; it’s more likely to provoke amusement, as in the photo below); making benches which look uncomfortable (whether or not they are); paying(?) scary or unattractive other ‘users’ to hang around the bench to scare people away (which perhaps defeats the object slightly); or, probably most likely, using overt surveillance of the bench, by humans or cameras, which brings in considerations of the legal mechanisms too (and maybe economic, in the form of fines). Another aspect of surveillance is making the (unwanted) interaction visible to other users - using the pressure of social norms to ’shame’ people into not doing something (positioning the sink outside the bathroom, in a kind of ante-room visible to others, is a good example), but it’s difficult to see how to apply this to the bench example - even if the bench is, say, positioned where lots of people will see the user sleeping on it, the pressure to vacate it is pretty low. This is a kind of ‘public’ feedback; feedback itself is an extremely important psychological mechanism in interaction design, but seems (from my research so far) to be much more applicable to some of the other general target behaviours.

A genuine sign in Orlando, via Boing Boing; and some applicable wider scope psychological mechanisms.

The wider scope psychological mechanisms are much more positive - indeed, more positive than anything else so far in this example. Here, the aim is to make alternative systems - i.e. an alternative to sleeping on the park bench, whatever it might be - more attractive. This is where this sort of thing comes into play:

Sean Godsell’s ‘House in a Park’, a bench that folds out into a rudimentary shelter (above) and (below) Bus Shelter House, which “converts into an emergency overnight accommodation. The bench lifts to reveal a woven steel mattress and the advertising hoarding is modified to act as a dispenser of blankets, food, and water.”

Note that at this level, the alternative systems themselves are attractive (more attractive than sleeping on the park bench) by simply fulfilling users’ needs rather than any psychological ‘tricks’. There is a lesson there.

‘Guerrilla’ responses by users frustrated at heavy-handed anti-user measures don’t directly have a place in the DwI Method, at least as currently constituted, but in this case, for example, providing temporary cardboard seating (/sleeping benches) or even parts that fit over benches with central armrests to permit sleeping once again, as Crosbie Fitch suggests, are worth thinking about:

Perhaps also, for each anti-sit seat design, one could come up with cardboard add-ons that re-enable long-term seating and recumbence. These could be labelled “Temporary Seat Repairs”, “Protective Seat Covers”, “Citizen City Seats”, or something far wittier.

It’s the structural mechanisms which suggest the more large-scale ’solutions’, from provision of alternative systems (as in the Sean Godsell examples above) to actually removing the need for anyone to sleep rough. Ultimately, of course, that’s a better goal than any of the above - anything discussed in this article - but it’s not really a ’solution’, rather a desirable aim, or even an intended target behaviour in itself, addressing a social issue rather than a ‘design’ one. Addressing the ‘disease’ rather than merely disguising the symptoms is surely preferable in the long-term.

Alternatively, some cities have simply removed benches altogether where there is a ‘homeless problem…

Benches stripped in Washington DC - “A small homeless population [had grown] there within the past few months”. photo by Fredo Alvarez.

…’removal of system entirely‘ being the structural mechanism there: doing absolutely nothing to help the homeless users, and in the process removing the benches for everyone who uses the park.

Conclusions

The choice of such a negative example for demonstrating this very early version of the Design With Intent Method - where almost all the ’solutions’ suggested are anti-user and generally unfriendly - reflects, pretty much, where my ‘architectures of control’ research came from in the first place. Most of the examples posted on the site over the past couple of years have generally been about stopping users doing something, forcing them to do something they don’t want to do, or tricking them into doing something against their own best interests - certainly more than have been about more positive efforts to help and guide users.

I thought that using the DwI Method initially to see if I could ‘get inside the head’ (possibly) of the ‘they’ who implement this kind of disciplinary architecture would be a useful insight, before applying the method to something more user-friendly and worthwhile - which willl be the next task.

*As ‘Silverman’ cautioned before, the aim must not be to remove the use of engineering/design intuition - most creative people would not respond well to that anyway - but primarily to inspire possible solutions.

Review: Architecture as Crime Control by Neal Katyal

Published October 18th, 2007 in Architecture, Architectures of Control, Articles, Ballardian, Built Environment, Civil rights, Control, Convention, Creeping erosion of norms, Crime, Deleuze, Design, Design philosophy, Designers, Do artifacts have politics?, Embedding code, Environmental, Foucault, Health and safety, Hidden persuaders, Indoctrination, Insurance, Interaction design, Law, Legislation, Lighting, Norms, Panopticon, PhD, Philosophy of control, Political design, Privacy, Public money, Regulation, Restriction, Social engineering, Spatial, Surveillance, Techniques of persuasion, Urban and User Psychology. 4 Comments

Review: Katyal, N. K. “Architecture as Crime Control”, Yale Law Journal, March 2002, Vol 111, Issue 5.

Professor Neal Kumar Katyal of Georgetown University Law School, best-known for being (successful) lead counsel in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case dealing with Guantanamo Bay detainees, has also done some important work on the use of design as a method of law enforcement in both the digital and built environments.

This article, ‘Architecture as Crime Control’, specifically addresses itself to a legal and social policy-maker audience in terms of the areas of focus and the arguments used, but is also very relevant to architects and designers open to being enlightened about the strategic value of their work. Specifically with regard to ‘architectures of control’ and ‘design for behaviour change’, as one might expect, there are many useful examples and a great deal of interesting analysis. In this review, I will try to concentrate on examples and design techniques given in the article, along with some of the thinking behind them - the most useful aspects from the point of view of my own research - rather than attempting to analyse the legal and sociological framework into which all of this fits.

Katyal starts by acknowledging how the “emerging field of cyberlaw, associated most directly with Lawrence Lessig” has brought the idea of ‘code’ constraining behaviour to a level of greater awareness, but suggests that the greater permanence and endurance of architectural changes in the real world - the built environment - may actually give greater potential for behaviour control, as opposed to the “infinitely malleable” architecture of cyberspace:

It is time to reverse-engineer cyberlaw’s insights, and to assess methodically whether changes to the architecture of our streets and buildings can reduce criminal activity.

A theme to which Katyal returns throughout the article is that the policy response to James Wilson and George Kelling’s influential ‘Broken Windows’ - “an architectural problem in crime control” - has largely been a law enforcement one (”prosecution of minor offenses like vandalism in an attempt to deter these ‘gateway crimes’”) instead of actual architectural responses, which, Katyal argues, could have a significant and useful role in this field.

Design principles

Before tackling specific architectural strategies, Katyal discusses the general area of using “design principles” to “influence, in subtle ways, the paths by which we live and think” - a great summary of many of the techniques we’ve considered on this blog over the last couple of years, though not all have been subtle - and gives some good examples:

Fast food restaurants use hard chairs that quickly grow uncomfortable so that customers rapidly turn over

Image from Headphonaught’s Flickr stream

Elevator designers place the numerals and floor indicator lights over people’s heads so that they avoid eye contact and feel less crowded

Supermarkets have narrow aisles so that customers cannot easily talk to each other and must focus on the products instead

(We’ve also seen the opposite effect cited, i.e. using wider aisles to cause customers to spend longer in a particular aisle - clearly, both effects could be employed in different product areas within the same supermarket, to suit whatever strategy the retailer has. There are plenty of other tricks too.)

And, in a footnote, Katyal cites Personal Space by Robert Sommer, which provides:

other examples, such as a café that hired an architect to design a chair that placed “disagreeable pressure on the spine if occupied for over a few minutes” and Conrad Hilton’s decision to move couches out of hotel lobbies to minimise the number of lingering visitors.

(Sommer’s work sounds interesting and relevant, and I look forward to investigating it*)

As Katyal puts it, “with strategies like these, private architects are currently engaging in social control.”

Moving on to architectural strategies for crime control, Katyal expounds four ‘mechanisms’ identified in the field of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED):

Design should:

(1) Create opportunities for natrual surveillance by residents, neighbors and bystanders;

(2) Instill a sense of territoriality so that residents develop proprietary attitudes and outsiders feel deterred from entering a private space;

(3) Build communities and avoid social isolation;

(4) Protect targets of crime.

Before expanding on the practical and legal application of each of these mechanisms, Katyal makes the point that while they can often “work in synergy… natural surveillance is most effective when social isolation is minimized and when design delays the perpetration of crime,” there can be conflicts and any strategy needs to be developed within the context of the community in which it is going to be applied:

Effective design requires input by the community. Without such input, security features are likely to be resented, taken down or evaded (consider the ’security’ doors propped open on campuses today.

(This issue of ‘resentment’ or even ‘inconvenience’ is, I feel, going to be a significant factor in my own studies of environmentally beneficial behaviour-changing products; we shall see.)

Natural surveillance

The idea of natural surveillance is to create situations where areas are overlooked by neighbours, other residents and so on, with the effect being both a crime deterrent (if the criminal knows he is being watched, or might be watched, he may decide against the crime) and to improve the effectiveness of solving the crime afterwards (someone will have seen what happened). Katyal cites Jane Jacobs‘ argument that diversity of use can be an important way of bringing about natural surveillance - preferably with different activities occurring throughout the day, to ensure that there is always a population there to keep any eye on things. However, short of this kind of deliberate diversity planning, there are specific techniques that can be used on individual buildings and their surroundings to increase natrual surveillance; Katyal suggests the addition of windows facing onto public spaces, ensuring sight lines down corridors and alleyways, positioning windows so that neighbours can watch each other’s houses, bringing parking areas in front of stores rather than out of sight behind them, and making sure hallways and lobbies are clearly visible to passers-by. He gives the example of redesigning the layout of a school’s grounds to increase the opportunity for natural surveillance:

Images from Katyal, N. K. “Architecture as Crime Control”, Yale Law Journal, March 2002, Vol 111, Issue 5.

[In the first image] the informal areas are blocked form sight and far from school grounds. Because no central place for congregation exists, students are spread over the grounds, and there is insufficient density for monitoring. The four open entrances and exits facilitate access to the school and escape.
…
[In the second image,] through the designation of formal gathering areas, other places become subtly off-limits to students. Indeed, those who are present in such areas are likely to attract suspicion…. the formal gathering areas are naturally surveilled by building users… [and] are long and thin, running alongside the school windows, and two hedges prevent students from going fuarther away. Moreover, the west entrance, which had the least potential for surveillance, has been closed…

Lighting can also be a major method of increasing natural surveillance:

First, it helps anyone viewing a situation to see it more clearly and thereby deters some crimes by increasing the powers of perception of those watching. Second, it encourages people to be in the area in the first place because the greater visibility creates a sense of security. The more eyes on the street, the more visibility constrains crime.

(Incidentally, Katyal comments - having interviewed an architect - that the use of yellow street lighting “can increase the crime rate by making streets (and individuals on them) look menacing”, hence a tendency for some urban developers to move to white lighting instead.)

Territoriality

Territoriality - also much of the focus of defensible space (which I’ll discuss in a later post) - “both provides an incentive for residents to take care of and monitor an area and subtly deters offenders by warning them that they are about to enter a private space.” Some of Katyal’s examples are wonderfully simple:

“An entrance raised by a few inches” is “a successful symbolic barrier… people are aware of minor graduations of elevation and may refrain from entry if they sense a gradual incline”. (Elevation can also lead to reverence/respect, either directly - e.g. steps leading up to a courthouse - or indirectly, causing a visitor to bow his/her head on approach)

Monuments and markers can also demarcate the transition from public space into private space… A study of burglaries in Salt Lake City… revealed that houses with nameplates had lower rates of intrusion than those without them.

One rather simple way is to place two buildings in an ‘L’ formation with a fence that completes the triangle. Children can play in the open space, and adults can look out of their windows at their children.

Katyal also includes these diagrams from “a group of British architects”:

In the first, a series of buildings lacks a common entrance, and pedestrians cut through the property. The addition of a simple overhead arch, however, creates a sense of private space:

Images originally from Stollard, P. Crime Prevention Through Housing Design and included in Katyal’s article.

Building community

The third main mechanism, building community, is also heavily interlinked with the idea of defensible space. The aim here is to encourage a sense of community, by creating spaces which cause people to interact, or even reducing the number of dwellings in each individual set so that people are more likely to recognise and come to know their neighbours - something many architects have instinctively tried to do anyway over the past 20 years or so, though not always explicitly with crime reduction in mind:

…even the placement of seats and benches can bring people together or divide them, creating what architects call, respectively, sociopetal and sociofugal spaces. Some architects self-consciously create sociofugal spaces by, for example, designing chairs in airports that make it difficult for people to talk to each other.

Practically, ‘building community’ would necessarily appear to be slightly more nebulous than some of the other mechanisms, but even techniques such as encouraging people to spend more time in communal areas such as a laundry (and hence potentially interact more) can be important here.

Strengthening targets

There are a number of simple examples of target hardening or strengthening given:

Placing deadbolts lower on door frames

(presumably to make kicking them open more difficult)

Having doors in vulnerable locations swing outward

Raising fire escapes to put them out of easy reach

Reducing the size of letter-box openings

If a robber can stand on top of a trash bin and reach a second-floor window, the bin should be placed far from the window

Prickly shrubs placed outside of windows can also deter crime

A duct that spews hot air can be placed near a ground-floor window to deter entry

Smells can also be strategically harnessed either to induce people to come outside or keep them away

The FBI building is built on stilts to minimize damage in the event of a bomb detonation at street level

To decrease the likelihood of presidential assassination, a stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House was barricaded and closed to car traffic

Interestingly, Katyal makes the point that where potential crime targets can be strengthened without making it overly obvious that this has been done, the benefits may be greater:

Modern technology permits targets to be hardened in ways that are not obvious to the public. Strong plastics, graffiti-resistant paint, and doors with steel cores are a few examples. These allow architects to disguise their efforts at strengthening targets and thus avoid sending a message that crime is rampant.
…
Some forms of target hardening are suboptimal in that visibility evinces a fear of crime that can cause damage to the fabric of a community and even increase crime rates.

He again later returns to this point:

Subtle architecture that gently reinfoces law-abiding norms and prevents a degree of intrusion is to be preferred to explicit and awkward physical barricades that reflect the feeling that a community is under siege. Cheap wire fences do not express a belief in the power of law or norms; rather, they reflect the opposite. The same can be said for ugly iron bars on windows, which express the terror of crime as powerfully as does any sign or published crime statistic.
…
A whole host of architectural strategies - such as the placement of doors and windows, creation of semipublic congregation spaces, street layout alterations, park redesign, and many more - sidestep creating an architecture dominated by the expression of fear. Indeed, cheap barricades often substitute for these subtler measures. Viewed this way, gated communities are a byproduct of public disregard of architecture, not a sustainable solution to crime.[my emphasis]

(This last point is especially interesting to me - I must admit I am fascinated by the phenomenon of gated communities and what effect they have on their inhabitants as well as on the surrounding area, both in a Ballardian sense (Running Wild, Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes) and, more prosaically, in terms of what this voluntary separation does to the community outside the gates. See also the quote from architect John Thompson in my forthcoming post reporting what’s happening at the former Brunel Runnymede Campus)

Other aspects

One point to which Katyal repeatedly returns is - a corollary of the above - the concept of architectural solutions as entities which subtly reinforce or embody norms (desirable ones, from the point of view of law enforcement) rather than necessarily enforce them in totality:

Even the best social codes are quite useless if it is impossible to observe whether people comply with them. Architecture, by facilitating interaction and monitoring by members of a community, permits social norms to have greater impact. In this way, the power of architecture to influence social norms can even eclipse that of law, for law faces obvious difficulties when it attempts to regulate social interaction directly.

…

Architecture can prevent crimes even when criminals believe the probability of enforcement is low… one feature of social norms strategies is that they are often self-enforcing.

I think this is a crucial point, and is applicable in other ‘architectures of control’ techniques outside of the built environment and the specific issues of crime. Norms can be extremely powerful influencers of behaviour, and - to take my current research on changing user behaviour to reduce environmental impact - the ability to design a desirable norm into a product or system, without taking away the user’s sense of ownership of, and confidence in, the product, may well turn out to be the crux of the matter.

As (I hope) will be clear, much of Katyal’s analysis seems applicable to other areas of ‘Design for/against X’ where human factors are involved - not just design against crime. So, for example, here Katyal is touching on something close to the concepts of perceived affordances (and disaffordances) in interaction design:

Psychological evidence shows that criminals decode environmental ‘cues’ to assess the likelihood of success of a given criminal act… the design of a meeting table influences who will speak and when, and who is perceived to have a positionof authority. It is therefore no great shock that the eight months of negotiation that preceded the 1969 Paris Peace Talks largely centred on what the physical space of the negotiating table would be. It is said that Machiavelli designed a political meeting chamber with a ceiling that looked asif it were about to collapse, reasoning that it would induce politicians to vote quickly and leave.
…
Winston Churchill… went so far as to claim that the shape of the House [of Commons] was essential to the two-party system and that its small size was critical for ‘free debate’:
…
“The party system is much favoured by the oblong form of chamber… the act of crossing the floor is one which requires serious consideration. I am well informed on this matter, for I have accomplished that difficult process, not only once but twice.”

Significant points are also made is about displacement (or “geographic substitution”) of crime: do architectual measures (especially target hardening and obvious surveillance, we might assume) not simply move crime elsewhere? (We’ve discussed this before when looking at blue lighting in public toilets.) Katyal argues that, while some displacement will, of course, occur, this is not always direct substitution. Locally-based criminals may not have knowledge of other areas (i.e. the certainty that these will not be hardened or surveilled targets), or indeed, where crime is opportunistic, the “costs” imposed by travelling elsewhere to commit it are too high. Equally:

Many devices, such as steel-reinforced doors, strong plastics, and the like are not discernible until a criminal has invested some energy and time. These forms of precaution will thus increase expected perpetration cost and deter offenders without risking substantial displacement.

Also, the fact that increased police presence (for example) in a crime ‘hot-spot’ may also lead to crime displacement, is generally not seen as a reason for not increasing that presence: some targets simply are more desirable to protect than others, and where architectural measures allow police to concentrate elsewhere, this may even be an advantage.

More specific examples

Aside from the analysis, there are a great many architectures of control and persuasion examples dotted throughout Katyal’s article, and while they are somewhat disparate in how I present them here, they are all worth noting from my point of view, and I hope interesting. Apart from those I’ve already quoted above, some of the other notable examples and observations are:

…the feeling of being crowded correlates with aggression. Architects can alleviate the sensation of crowding by adding windows that allow for natural light, by using rectangular rooms (which are perceived to be larger than square ones), and by employing light-colored paints. When people perceive more space, they tend to become less hostile.

While the results should not be overemphasized, psychologists have found results showing that various colors affect behavior and emotions. The most consistent such finding is that red induces a higher level of arousal than do cool colors like green and blue. Another study indicated that people walked faster down a hallway painted red or orange than down one painted in cooler colors. After experimenting with hundreds of shade, Professor Schauss identified a certain shade of pink, Baker-Miller, as the most successful color to mediate aggression… prisoners in Baker-Miller pink cells were found to be les abusive than those in magnolia-colored cells.

(See also discussion here)

Studies show that people who sit at right angles from each other at a table are six times more likely to engage in conversation than those who sit across from each other.

(referencing Edward T Hall, The Hidden Dimension, 1966).

For some existing housing projects, the government could pass regulations requiring retrofitting to prevent crime. Small private or semiprivate lawns near entrances can encourage feelings of territoriality; strong lighting can enhnace visibility; staining and glazing can increase contrast; and buildings refaced with a diversity of pleasing finishes can reflect individuality and territoriality. Large open spaces can be subdivided to encourage natural surveillance.

Edward I enacted the Statute of Winchester, a code designed to prevent the concealment of robbers… [which included a] provision [which] directly regulated environmental design to reduce crime… highways had to be enlarged and bushes had to be cleared for 200 feet on either side of the highway.

…certain buildings [being strategically placed in an area] such as churches, may reduce the crime rate because they create feelings of guilt or shame in potential perpetrators and because the absence of crime against such structures furthers visible social order.

Crimes that directly interfere with natural surveillance should… be singled out for special penalties. Destroying the lighting around a building is one obvious example. Another would be attempts by criminals to bring smoke-belching trucks onto a street before robbing an establishment.

Summary

Ultimately, Katyal’s aim seems to be to encourage policy-makers to see architectural measures as a potentially important aspect of crime reduction, given sensible analysis of each situation, and he suggests the use of Crime Impact Statements - possibly as a requirement for all new development - in a similar vein to Environmental Impact Statements, and leading to similar increases in awareness among architects and developers. Building codes and zoning policies could also be directed towards crime reduction through architectural strategies. Insurance companies, by understanding what measures ‘work’ and which don’t, could use premiums to favour, promote and educate property owners, similarly to the way that widespread adoption of better design for fire protection and prevention was significantly driven by insurance companies.

In this sense, a public (i.e. governmental) commitment to use of architectural strategies in this way would make the process much more transparent than individual private developers adopting ad hoc measures, and, with sensible analysis of each case, could assist local law enforcement and engage communities in reinforcing ‘desirable’ norms and ‘designing away’ some aspects of their problems - though Katyal makes it very clear that architecture alone cannot do this [my emphasis]:

None of this should be mistaken for architectural determinism or its derivative belief that good buildings alone will end crime. These hopes of ’salvation by bricks’ are illusory. But our rejection of this extreme should not lead us to the opposite extreme view, which holds that physical settings are irrelevant to human beliefs and action. Architecture influences behavior; it does not determine it.

*Katyal also later cites Sommer’s Social Design for the example of airports that “prevent crime by replacing bathroom entrance doors with right-angle entrances that permit the warning sounds of crime to travel more freely and that reduce the sense of isolation”. I’d always assumed that (as with the toilet facilities in many motorway services here in the UK), this was to reduce the number of surfaces that a toilet user would have to touch - a similar strategy to having the entrance doors to public toilet areas pushable/elbowable/nudgable by users leaving the area, rather than forcing recently-washed hands to come into contact with a pull-handle which may not be especially clean. See also Sara Cantor’s thoughts on encouraging handwashing.

Smile, you’re on Countermanded Camera

Published July 9th, 2007 in 1984, Analog hole, Architectures of Control, Censorship, Circumvention, Civil rights, Control, Democracy of innovation, Design, Design philosophy, Designers, Do artifacts have politics?, Erosion of liberty, Everyware, Fightback Devices, Future, Gadgets, Interaction design, Intrusive technology, Liberty, Observation, Orwellian, Panopticon, Pervasive computing, Political design, Privacy, Protest, Security, Signal blocking, Sousveillance, Spatial, Surveillance, Technology, User Psychology and Video. 13 Comments

IDPS : Miquel Mora
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 organisations seem to fear photography), but a few ‘fightback’ devices have been produced, aiming to empower the individual against others (e.g. Hewlett-Packard’s ‘paparazzi-proof’ camera) or against authority (e.g. the Backflash system intended to render a car number plate unreadable when photographed by a speed camera). The field of sousveillance - lots of interesting articles by Régine Debatty here - is also a ‘fightback’ in a parallel vein.

Taking the fightback idea further, into the realms of everyware, Miquel Mora’s IDentity Protection System, shown last month at the RCA’s Great Exhibition (many thanks to Katrin Svabo Bech for the tip-off), aims to offer the individual a way to control how his or her image is recorded - again, Régine from We Make Money Not Art:

With IDPS (IDentity Protection System), interaction designer Miquel Mora is proposing a new way to protect our visual identity from the invasion of ubiquitous surveillance cameras. He had a heap of green stickers that could stick to your jacket. Or anywhere else. The sticker blurred your image on the video screen.

“With the IDPS project I wanted to sparkle [sic.] debate about all the issues related to identity privacy,” explains Miquel. “Make people think about how our society has become a complete surveillance machine. Our identities have already been stored as data in many servers ready to be tracked. And our self image is our last resort. So we really need tools to protect our privacy. We need tools that can allow us to hide or reveal our visual image. We must have the control over it.”

“For example in one scenario a girl is wearing a tooth jewellery with IDPS technology embedded. So when she smiles she reveals it and it triggers the camera to protect her. With IDPS users can always feel comfortable, knowing that with a simple gesture like smiling, they are in control. The IDPS technology could be embedded in all kind of items, from simple badges to clothes or jewellery. For the working prototype I’m using Processing to track the stickers and pixelate the image around when it founds one.”

IDPS : Miquel Mora
Image from Miquel Mora’s website

While the use of stickers or similar tags (why not RFID?) which can be embedded in items such as jewellery is a very neat idea aesthetically, I am not sure what economic/legal incentive would drive CCTV operators or manufacturers to include something such as IDPS in their systems and respect the wishes of users. CCTV operators generally do not want anyone to be able to exclude him or herself from being monitored and recorded, whether that’s by wearing a hoodie or a smart black hat with maroon ribbon. Or indeed a veil of some kind.

Something which actively fought back against unwanted CCTV or other surveillance intrusion, such as reversing the Georgia Tech system in some way (e.g. detecting the CCD of a digital security camera, and sending a laser to blind it temporarily, or perhaps some kind of UV strobe) would perhaps be more likely to ’succeed’, although I’m not sure how legal it would be. Still, with RCA-quality interaction designers homing in on these kinds of issues, I think we’re going to see some very interesting concepts and solutions in the years ahead…

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!)

Some links

Published January 17th, 2007 in 1984, Apple, Architecture, Architectures of Control, Blogosphere, Built Environment, Business model, Cell phones, Circumvention, Consumer rights, Control, Creeping erosion of norms, Crime, DRM, Design, Design philosophy, Digital rights, Do artifacts have politics?, Entropy, Foucault, Freedom to tinker, Future, Gadgets, Interaction design, Intrusive technology, Mobile phones, Monopoly, Music, Music industry, Open source, Orwellian, Panopticon, Political design, Punishment, RIAA, Rent-seeking, Software, Specious arguments, Stallman, Stifling innovation, Surveillance, Techniques of persuasion, Treacherous computing, Trusted Computing, User experience and iPhone. 2 Comments

Some links. Guess what vehicle this is.

First, an apology for anyone who’s had problems with the RSS/Atom feeds over the last month or so. I think they’re fixed now (certainly Bloglines has started picking them up again) but please let me know if you don’t read this. Oops, that won’t work… anyway:

‘Gadgets as Tyrants’ by Xeni Jardin, looks at digital architectures of control in the context of the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas :

Many of the tens of thousands of products displayed last week on the Vegas expo floor, as attractive and innovative as they are, are designed to restrict our use… Even children are bothered by the increasing restrictions. One electronics show attendee told me his 12-year-old recently asked him, “Why do I have to buy my favorite game five times?” Because the company that made the game wants to profit from each device the user plays it on: Wii, Xbox, PlayStation, Game Boy or phone.

At this year’s show, the president of the Consumer Electronics Association, Gary Shapiro, spoke up for “digital freedom,” arguing that tech companies shouldn’t need Hollywood’s permission when they design a new product.

The Consumerist - showing a 1981 Walmart advert for a twin cassette deck - comments that “Copying music wasn’t always so taboo”.

I’m not sure it is now, either.

George Preston very kindly reminds me of the excellent Trusted Computing FAQ by Ross Anderson, a fantastic exposition of the arguments. For more on Vista’s ‘trusted’ computing issues, Peter Guttmann has some very clear explanations of how shocking far we are from anything sensible. See also Richard Stallman’s ‘Right to Read’.

David Rickerson equally kindly sends me details of a modern Panopticon prison recently built in Colorado - quite impressive in a way:

…Architects hit a snag when they realized too much visibility could create problems.

“We’ve got lots of windows looking in, but the drawback is that inmates can look from one unit to another through the windows at the central core area of the ward,” Gulliksen says. “That’s a big deal. You don’t want inmates to see other inmates across the hall with gang affiliations and things like that.”

To minimize unwanted visibility, the design team applied a reflective film to all the windows facing the wards. Deputies can see out, but inmates cannot see in. Much like the 18th-century Panopticon, the El Paso County jail design keeps inmates from seeing who is watching them.

Image from Correctional News website

Should the iPhone be more open?

As Jason Devitt says, stopping users installing non-Apple (or Apple-approved) software means that the cost of sending messages goes from (potentially) zero, to $5,000 per megabyte:

Steve typed “Sounds great. See you there.” 28 characters, 28 bytes. Call it 30. What does it cost to transmit 30 bytes?

* iChat on my Macbook: zero.
* iChat running on an iPhone using WiFi: zero.
* iChat running on an iPhone using Cingular’s GPRS/EDGE data network: 6 hundredths of a penny.
* Steve’s ‘cool new text messaging app’ on an iPhone: 15c.

A nickel and a dime.

15c for 30 bytes = $0.15 X 1,000,000 / 30 = $5,000 per megabyte.

“Yes, but it isn’t really $5,000,” you say. It is if you are Cingular, and you handle a few billion messages like this each quarter.

… [I] assumed that I would be able to install iChat myself. Or better still Adium, which supports AIM, MSN, ICQ, and Jabber. But I will not be able to do that because … it will not be possible to install applications on the iPhone without the approval of Cingular and Apple… But as a consumer, I have a choice. And for now the ability to install any application that I want leaves phones powered by Windows Mobile, Symbian, Linux, RIM, and Palm OS with some major advantages over the iPhone.

Aside from the price discrimination (and business model) issue (see also Control & Networks), one thing that strikes me about a phone with a flat touch screen is simply how much less haptic feedback the user gets.

I know people who can text competently without looking at the screen, or indeed the phone at all. They rely on the feel of the buttons, the pattern of raised and lowered areas and the sensation as the button is pressed, to know whether or not the character has actually been entered, and which character it was (based on how many times the button is pressed). I would imagine they would be rather slow with the iPhone.

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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