University :: Architectures of Control

User-Centred Design for Sustainable Behaviour

Published May 28th, 2008 in Architectures of Control, Articles, Blogosphere, Design, Design philosophy, Designers, Engineering design, Environmental, PhD, Product design, Sustainability, University, Usability and User Psychology. 0 Comments

Image from uselog.com

TU Delft’s Renee Wever and Jasper van Kuijk (who runs the insightful Uselog product usability blog), together with NTNU’s Casper Boks, have produced a very interesting paper, ‘User-Centred Design for Sustainable Behaviour’ [PDF, 400 kb] for the International Journal of Sustainable Engineering (indeed, probably in the same edition as my own paper addressing many similar ideas.)

It’s great to find more people investigating this same area of using design to guide more sustainable user behaviour, both from the point of view of validation (i.e. I’m not barking up completely the wrong tree) and because it helps add additional perspectives and research to the pot. Wever, van Kuijk and Boks’ classification of different strategies may be useful, too, in helping me structure my own taxonomy:

We provide a typology of four user-centered design strategies for inducing sustainable behavior.

* Functionality matching: adapt a product better to the actual use by consumers and thereby try to minimize negative side effects;
* Eco-feedback: the user is presented with specific information on the impact of his or her current behavior, and it is left to the user to relate this information to his or her own behaviour, and adapt this behaviour, or not;
* Scripting: creating obstacles for unsustainable use, or making sustainable behaviour so easy, it is performed almost without thinking about it;
* Forced functionality: making products adapt automatically to changing circumstances, or to design-in strong obstacles to prevent unsustainable behaviour.

That’s a simpler and possibly clearer way of dividing it up than the designer-centric approach I’ve been taking (e.g. see this series of posts), though my method aims to apply to all using-design-to-shape-behaviour problems, including, but going beyond, ecodesign.

I’m heartened to read this in the paper:

An overview of the available design strategies is missing, as is a clear approach for choosing the right strategy for a given product.

That’s very much part of what I’m trying to achieve.

I’ll certainly keep an eye on what the guys from Delft and NTNU do next!

archiPWNED

Published May 24th, 2007 in Architecture, Architectures of Control, Ballardian, Built Environment, Control, Design, Design philosophy, Do artifacts have politics?, Embedding code, Forcing functions, Philosophy of control, Randian, Spatial, Techniques of persuasion, US, University and Urban. 0 Comments

archiPWNED by Scott Nusinow
Image from archiPWNED portfolio entry (PDF)

Scott Nusinow, one of Cory Doctorow’s students in his University of Southern California class, ‘PWNED: Everyone on Campus is a Copyright Criminal‘, carried out an architectural concept project for the design of a Los Angeles library. He’s specifically addressed ‘architectures of control’ in the contexts of encouraging the public to use the library in an era where “the printed word… is marching towards obsolescence” and encouraging pedestrians to use the retail facilities on the same site (”by seeking to create a “positive feedback loop” of activity by funneling people towards the retail.”)

Scott’s full portfolio entry (PDF) has some interesting commentary, sketches, renderings and models. (As an aside, there’s something about architectural models that’s always fascinated me, and images such as the one above - even the surveillant pose of the figure in the window - evoke an odd mixture of Ballardian and Randian influences.)

I know there are some architecture graduates, students and enthusiasts who read this blog, but not knowing enough, myself, about the subject, I’d be very interested to know: To what extent are notions of control and behaviour-shaping taught as part of architectural training? This series of discussion board posts suggest that the issue is definitely there for architecture students, but is it framed as a conscious, positive process (e.g. “funnel the pedestrians past the shops”), a reactionary one (e.g. “use pebbled paving to make it painful for hippies to congregate“), or as something else entirely?

Education, forcing functions and understanding

Published January 21st, 2007 in Architectures of Control, Control, Design, Education, Embedding code, Forcing functions, Good design, Hidden persuaders, Innovation, Interaction design, Mathematics, Mistake-proofing, Poka-yoke, Security, Techniques of persuasion, Teenagers, Textbooks, University, Usability and User Psychology. 6 Comments

Engineering Mathematics, by K Stroud

Mr Person at Text Savvy looks at an example of ‘Guided Practice’ in a maths textbook - the ‘guidance’ actually requiring attention from the teacher before the students can move on to working independently - and asks whether some type of architecture of control (a forcing function perhaps) would improve the situation, by making sure (to some extent) that each student understood what’s going on before being able to continue:

Image from Text Savvy
Is there room here for an architecture of control, which can make Guided Practice live up to its name?

This is a very interesting problem. Of course, learning software could prevent the student moving to the next screen until the correct answer is entered in a box. This must have been done hundreds of times in educational software, perhaps combined with tooltips (or the equivalent) that explain what the error is, or how to think differently to solve it - something like the following (I’ve just mocked this up, apologies for the hideous design):

Greyed-out Next button as a forcing function

The ‘Next’ button is greyed out to prevent the student advancing to the next problem until this one is correctly solved, and the deformed speech bubble thing gives a hint on how to think about correcting the error.

But just as a teacher doesn’t know absolutely if a student has really worked out the answer for him/herself, or copied it from another student, or guessed it, so the software doesn’t ‘know’ that the student has really solved the problem in the ‘correct’ way. (Certainly in my mock-up above, it wouldn’t be too difficult to guess the answer without having any understanding of the principle involved. We might say, “Well, implement a ‘3 wrong answers and you’re out’ policy to stop guessing,” but how does that actually help the student learn? I’ll return to this point later.)

Blind spots in understanding

I think that brings us to something which, frankly, worried me a lot when I was a kid, and still intrigues (and scares) me today: no-one can ever really know how (or how well) someone else ‘understands’ something.

What do I mean by that?

I think we all, if we’re honest, will admit to having areas of knowledge / expertise / understanding on which we’re woolly, ignorant, or with which we are not fully at ease. Sometimes the lack of knowledge actually scares us; other times it’s merely embarrassing.

For many people, maths (anything beyond simple arithmetic) is something to be feared. For others, it’s practical stuff such as car maintenance, household wiring, and so on. Medicine and medical stuff worries me, because I have never made the effort to learn enough about it, and it’s something that could affect me in a major way; equally, I’m pretty ignorant of a lot of literature, poetry and fine art, but that’s embarrassing rather than worrying.

Think for yourself: which areas of knowledge are outside your domain, and does your lack of understanding scare/intimidate you, or just embarrass you? Or don’t you mind either way?

Bringing this back to education, think back to exams, tests and other assessments you’ve taken in your life. How much did you “get away with”? Be honest. How many aspects did you fail to understand, yet still get away without confronting? In some universities in the UK, for instance, the pass mark for exams and courses is 40%. That may be an extreme, and it doesn’t necessarily follow that some students actually fail to understand 60% of what they’re taught and still pass, but it does mean that a lot of people are ‘qualified’ without fully understanding aspects of their own subject.

What’s also important is that even if everyone in the class got, say, 75% right, that 75% understanding would be different for each person: if we had four questions, A, B, C and D, some people would get A, B, and C right and D wrong; others A, B, D right and C wrong, and so on. Overall, the ‘understanding in common’ among a sample of students would be nowhere near 75%. It might, in fact, be small. And even if two students have both got the same answer right, they may ‘understand’ the issue differently, and may not be able to understand how the other one understands it. How does a teacher cope with this? How can a textbook handle it? How should assessors handle it?

I’ll admit something here. I never ‘liked’ algebraic factorisation when I was doing GCSE (age 14-15) A-level (16-17) or engineering degree level maths - I could work out that, say, (2x² + 2)(3x + 5)(x - 1) = 6x^4 + 4x³ - 4x² + 4x - 10 (I think! I don’t think there’s an HTML character code for a superscript 4, sorry), but there’s no way I could have done that in reverse, extracting the factors (2x² + 2)(3x + 5)(x - 1) from the expanded expression, other than by laborious trial and error. Something in my mathematical understanding made me ‘unable’ to do this, but I still got away with it, and other than meaning I wasted a bit more time in exams, I don’t think this blind spot affected me too much.

OK, that’s an excessively boring example, but there must be many much, much worse examples where an understanding blind spot has actually adversely affected a situation, or the competence of a whole company or project. Just reading sites such as Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science (where some shocking scientific misunderstandings and nonsense are highlighted) or even SharkTank (where some dreadful IT misunderstandings, often by management, are chronicled) or any number of other collections of failures, shows very clearly that there are a lot of people in influential positions, with great power and resources at their fingertips, who have significant knowledge and understanding blind spots even within domains with which they are supposedly professionally involved.

Forcing functions in textbooks

Back to education again, then: assuming that we agree that incompetence is bad, then gaps in understanding are important to resolve, or at least to investigate. How well can a teaching system or textbook be designed to make sure students really understand what they’re doing?

Putting mistake-proofing (poka-yoke) or forcing functions into conventional paper textbooks is much harder than doing it in software, but there are ways of doing it. A few years ago, I remember coming across a couple of late-1960s SI Metric training manuals which claimed to be able to “convert” the way the reader thought (i.e. Imperial to SI) through a “unique” method, which was quoted on the cover (in rather direct language) as something like “You make a mistake: you are CORRECTED. You fail to grasp a fundamental concept: you CANNOT proceed.” The way this was accomplished was simply by, similarly to (but not the same as) the classic Choose Your Own Adventure method, having multiple routes through the book, with the ‘page numbers’ being a three digit code generated by the student based on the answers to the questions on the current page. I’ve tried to mock up (from distant memory) the top and bottom sections of a typical page:

Mock-up of a 1960s 'guided learning' textbook

In effect, the instructions routed the student back and forth through the book based on the level of understanding demonstrated by answering the questions: a kind of flow chart or algorithm implemented in a paperback book, and with little incentive to ‘cheat’ since it was not obvious how far through the book one was. (Of course, the ‘length’ of the book would differ for different students depending on how well they did in the exercises they did.) There were no answers to look up: proceeding to whatever next stage was appropriate would show the student whether he/she had understood the concept correctly.

When I can find the books again (along with a lot of my old books, I don’t have them with me where I’m living at present), I will certainly post up some real images on the blog, and explain the system further. (It’s frustrating me now as I type this early on a Sunday morning that I can’t remember the name of the publisher: there may well already be an enthusiasts’ website devoted to them. Of course, I can remember the cover design pretty well, with wide sans-serif capital letters on striped blue/white and murky green/white backgrounds; I guess that’s why I’m a designer!)

A weaker way of achieving a ‘mistake-proofing’ effect is to use the output of one page (the result of the calculation) as the input of the next page’s calculation, wherever possible, and confirm it at that point so that the student’s understanding at each stage is either confirmed or shown to be erroneous. So long as the student has to display his/her working, there is little opportunity to ‘cheat’ by turning the page to get the answer. No marks would be awarded for the actual answer; only for the working to reach it, and a student who just cannot understand what’s going wrong with one part of the exercise can go on to the next part with the starting value already known. This would also make marking the exercise much quicker for the teacher, since he or she does not have to follow through the entire working with incorrect values as often happens where a student has got a wrong value very early on in a major series of calculations (I’ve been that student; I had a very patient lecturer once who worked through an 18-side set of my calculations about a belt-driven lawnmower which all had wrong values, based on something I got wrong on the first page.)

Overall, the field of ‘control’ as a way of checking (or assisting) understanding is clearly worth much further consideration. Perhaps there are better ways of recognising users’ blind spots and helping resolve them before problems occur which depend on that knowledge. I’m sure I’ll have more to say too, at a later point, on the issue of widespread ignorance of certain subjects, and gaps in understanding and their effects; it would be interesting to hear readers’ thoughts, though.

Footnote: Security comparison

We saw earlier that there seems to be little point in educational software limiting the number of guesses a student can have at the answer, at least when the student isn’t allowed to proceed until the correct answer is entered. I’m not saying any credit should be awarded for simply guessing (it probably shouldn’t), just that deliberately restricting progress isn’t usually desirable in education. But it is in security: indeed that’s what most password and PIN implementations use. Regular readers of the blog will know that the work of security researchers such as Bruce Schneier, Ross Anderson, Ed Felten and Alex Halderman is frequently mentioned, often in relation to digital rights management, but looking at forcing functions in an educational context also shows how relevant security research is to other areas of design. Security techniques say “don’t let that happen until this has happened”; so do many architectures of control.

Bruce Schneier : Architecture & Security

Published October 20th, 2006 in 1984, Architecture, Architectures of Control, Bad design, Built Environment, Civil rights, Control, Creeping erosion of norms, Deleuze, Design, Design philosophy, Designed to be unpleasant, Do artifacts have politics?, Embedding code, Engineering design, Erosion of liberty, Exclusion, Foucault, Future, Health and safety, Interaction design, Intrusive technology, Law, Legislation, Liberty, London, Oppression, Orwellian, Panopticon, Philosophy of control, Political design, Privacy, Protest, Public money, Security, Sneaky, Social engineering, Spatial, Surveillance, Techniques of persuasion, US, University and Urban. 19 Comments

Bruce Schneier talks about ‘Architecture and Security’: architectural decisions based on the immediate fear of certain threats (e.g. car bombs, rioters) continuing to affect users of the buildings long afterwards. And he makes the connexion to architectures of control outside of the built environment, too:

“The same thing can be seen in cyberspace as well. In his book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Lawrence Lessig describes how decisions about technological infrastructure — the architecture of the internet — become embedded and then impracticable to change. Whether it’s technologies to prevent file copying, limit anonymity, record our digital habits for later investigation or reduce interoperability and strengthen monopoly positions, once technologies based on these security concerns become standard it will take decades to undo them.

It’s dangerously shortsighted to make architectural decisions based on the threat of the moment without regard to the long-term consequences of those decisions.”

Indeed.

The commenters detail a fantastic array of ‘disciplinary architecture‘ examples, including:

Pierce Hall, University of Chicago, “built to be “riotproof” by elevating the residence part of the dorm on large concrete pillars and developing chokepoints in the entranceways so that rioting mobs couldn’t force their way through.” (There must be lots of university buildings like this)

“The Atlanta Fed building has a beautiful lawn which surrounds the building, and is raised 4 or 5 feet from the surrounding street, with a granite restraining wall. It’s a very effective protection against truck bombs.”

The wide boulevards of Baron Haussmann’s Paris, intended to prevent barricading (a frequently invoked example on this blog)

The UK Ministry of Defence’s Defence Procurement Agency site at Abbey Wood, Bristol, “is split into car-side and buildings; all parking is as far away from the buildings (car bomb defence), especially the visitor section. you have to walk over a narrow footbridge to get in.

Between the buildings and the (no parking enforced by armed police) road is ‘lake’. This stops suicide bomber raids without the ugliness of the concrete barriers.

What we effectively have is a modern variant of an old castle. The lake supplants the moat, but it and the narrow choke point/drawbridge.”

SUNY Binghamton’s “College in the Woods, a dorm community… features concrete “quads” with steps breaking them into multiple levels to prevent charges; extremely steep, but very wide, stairs, to make it difficult to defend the central quad”

University of Texas at Austin: “The west mall (next to the Union) used to be open and grassy. They paved it over with pebble-y pavement to make it painful for hippies to walk barefoot and installed giant planters to break up the space. They also installed those concrete walls along Guadalupe (the drag) to create a barrier between town and gown, and many other “improvements.”"

I’m especially amused by the “making it painful for hippies to walk barefoot” comment! This is not too far from the anti-skateboarding corrugation sometimes used (e.g. the third photo here), though it seems that in our current era, there is a more obvious disconnect between ’security’ architecture (which may also involve vast surveillance or everyware networks, such as the City of London’s Ring of Steel) and that aimed at stopping ‘anti-social’ behaviour, such as homeless people sleeping, skateboarders, or just young people congregating.

DRM now the ‘biggest issue’ in preserving information for the future

Published July 11th, 2006 in Analog hole, Architectures of Control, Bad design, Bureaucracy, Censorship, Circumvention, Consumer rights, Control, Copyfight, Copyright, Creeping erosion of norms, DRM, Design, Design philosophy, Designers, Digital rights, Discriminatory Architecture, Distasteful corollary, Do artifacts have politics?, Dystopia, Education, Erosion of liberty, Greasing palms, Hidden persuaders, Indoctrination, Intellectual property, Interaction design, Intrusive technology, Killjoy technology, Law, Legislation, Liberty, London, Monopoly, Nonsense, Norms, Philosophy of control, Political design, Propaganda, Public money, Rent-seeking, Restriction, Software, Stifling innovation, Technical protection measures, Techniques of persuasion, Technology, Treacherous computing, University, User experience, Vague rhetoric, Worldwide and Your property. 0 Comments

The Guardian has an interview with Richard Masters, of the British Library’s digital objects management programme looking at the impact of technology on archiving. The usual worries about file formats, media incompatability and how to select what to preserve and what not to are discussed, but:

“The biggest issue is digital rights management. At the moment, acting as an honest broker between the public interest and the individual rights holders is incredibly difficult. Much more so than with printed material that is physically deposited on your site. Many electronic property holders lease material and specifically prohibit copying for preservation purposes.

Continue reading ‘DRM now the ‘biggest issue’ in preserving information for the future’

About this blog | Blog archives

Articles & presentations

Journal & conference papers
Making the user more efficient: Design for Sustainable Behaviour
International Journal of Sustainable Engineering (2008)
Design with Intent: Persuasive Technology in a Wider Context
Persuasive 2008, LNCS 5033 (2008)

Magazine articles
Architectures of Control in Product Design
Engineering Designer (2006)
Designs on your... freedom
Gown Magazine (2005)

Presentations & posters
Design with Intent: Persuasive Technology in a Wider Context
Presentation given at Persuasive 2008, Oulu, Finland (2008)
Design for Sustainable Behaviour
Poster presented at ResCon, Brunel University engineering & design conference (2008)
Design with Intent: Behaviour-Shaping through Design [coming soon]
Presentation given at New Sciences of Protection: Designing Safe Living, Lancaster, UK (2008)

More writing...

From the archives

Anti-perch spikes

Designing Safe Living

Tidying up the /cig-bin

Design with Intent presentation from Persuasive 2008

Some links: miscellaneous, pertinent to architectures of control

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MBA Geek: Because FUD is cheap

The Muse: Exploiting the desire for order

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