You’re owed an apology, dear reader, for the 2-month hiatus with the blog. It’s down to a variety of reasons compounding each other, and alternately forcing me to prioritise other pressing problems, then when I tried seizing the initiative again, frustrating me with technical issues and actually preventing posting. You probably never noticed it, due to the nature of the exploit, but this blog was drawn into this nightmare of invisible insertion of hundreds of spam links into the header and footer, incorporating the URLs of dozens of other similarly attacked Wordpress blogs, redirecting to the spammers’ intended destination.
Continue reading ‘Apologies for the delay to this service’
Apologies for the delay to this service
Published April 22nd, 2008 in Architectures of Control, Battery vehicles, Blogosphere, Bond Minicar, Brunel, Design, Electric vehicles, Internet economics, PhD, Software and Vague rhetoric. 4 CommentsInteresting parallels
Published January 15th, 2008 in Architectures of Control, Design, Design philosophy, Interaction design, Security and Vague rhetoric. 3 CommentsSecurity is about preventing adverse consequences from the intentional and unwarranted actions of others. What this definition basically means is that we want people to behave in a certain way… and security is a way of ensuring that they do so.
A simpler way of thinking about Interaction Designers is that they are the shapers of behavior. Interaction Designers… all attempt to understand and shape human behavior. This is the purpose of the profession: to change the way people behave.
Jon Kolko, Thoughts on Interaction Design
(Italic emphases are original; bold emphases are mine)
It’s interesting to see such similar language used in two fields which are rarely seen as related. But they are, of course: they are about human interaction with technology. To some extent, security - certainly the design of countermeasures - may be a rigorous, analytical subset of interaction design, just as interaction design is a subset of the intersection of technology and psychology. Designers in one field ought to be able to learn usefully from those in others.
Interaction design is not commonly defined as Jon Kolko does above - it was reading that specific quote on his website which persuaded me to buy his book - but it’s pretty close to the idea of design with intent.
Bye-bye 9rules
Published October 5th, 2007 in 9rules, Blogosphere, Fulminate, Internet economics, Site Announcements, Specious arguments and Vague rhetoric. 17 CommentsAround ten months ago, this site was accepted into 9rules, a diverse network of blogs which, at the time, had this aim:
9rules is a community of the best weblogs in the world on a variety of topics. We started 9rules to give passionate writers more exposure and to help readers find great blogs on their favorite subjects. It’s difficult to find sites worth returning to, so 9rules brings together the very best of the independent web all under one roof.
It was a great honour to be accepted, given the quality of the other blogs involved and the number that applied during the 24 hour ’submission window’. I remember sitting in a coffee shop on Lothian Road in Edinburgh having taken my laptop away on holiday purely to do the 9rules submission at the right time: some ‘recognition’ on this level meant a lot to me, and it still does.
And the site’s got a lot of new readers through 9rules: the start of every new post appeared, within a couple of hours, in both the ‘Design‘ and ‘Technology‘ feeds on the 9rules site, and a lot of people clicked through to read the full things, and then (often) stayed to read other posts. Equally, I found some truly amazing new blogs and interesting voices through perusing other members’ feeds: there is a wealth of passionate talent and opinion out there, and 9rules’ members never failed to impress. To a large extent I was a passive consumer of what 9rules brought me; I didn’t get involved with the ‘my.9r‘ social networking feature of the site, nor write any ‘Notes‘ (if I’m going to write something intelligent, I’ll write it on the blog, was my reasoning, but I certainly read a number of interesting discussions in the Notes section, and enjoyed doing so).
However, 9rules is changing its membership policy (compare the current ‘About’ page) and yesterday I received an email from 9rules’ Tyme White indicating that, effectively, any members who don’t participate in the community aspects of the site are no longer welcome:
Members spoke out about their displeasure concerning members that they never interact with and never hear from, yet all member entries carry the same weight on 9rules, which is not fair. After talking it out in Clubhouse, we made participating either in the private member area or my.9rules a requirement, part of the membership agreement… If you feel you are contributing by your entries being shown, 9rules is no longer a good fit for you, decline the agreement (or do not respond), remove the leaf from your site and we will remove your site from displaying on 9rules. If you agree but don’t have the time to interact or don’t feel you should (or don’t want to), the participation will become a chore, something you didn’t want to do in the first place. It just won’t work in the long-term so it would be best to decline now…
Let me be clear – participation in either the new member area or my.9rules is required for all members, requested by members.
I understand what she’s saying, and I’m not going to argue - but it’s a shame: forced participation would certainly “become a chore” and I’m not going to agree to commit to anything along those lines (I wonder how the level of participation will be measured or assessed?), so this site will be leaving 9rules, sadly, in due course.
Taking a broader view, in internet terms, 9rules’ move - to more of a ‘walled garden’, turned in on itself - seems very much at odds with the increased openness which has driven the dramatic growth of, say, Facebook. Perhaps 9rules wants ‘quality’ rather than ‘quantity’, but defining ‘quality’ as ‘frequency of participation’ seems to be rather arbitrarily quantitative, if that makes sense. I’m not sure there’s actually any correlation between time spent on interactive banter within a closed community, and creating worthwhile blog content that people want to read: it would seem that time spent on one precludes spending time on the other.
I hope some of the readers who originally found this site through 9rules will continue to read it (the RSS/Atom feed links are in the sidebar on the right), and I thank 9rules for the extra exposure it gave this site during my time as a member.
Normalising paranoia
Published July 27th, 2007 in 1984, Architectures of Control, Art making a point, Cargo cult, Censorship, Civil rights, Communication, Creeping erosion of norms, Design, Design philosophy, Designers, Do artifacts have politics?, Exclusion, Fightback Devices, Future, Graphic design, Hidden persuaders, Indoctrination, Liberty, Observation, Panopticon, Political design, Propaganda, Social engineering, Sousveillance, Techniques of persuasion, User Psychology, Vague rhetoric and advertising. 11 Comments
This is brilliant. Chloë Coulson, Erland Banggren and Ben Williams, three Ravensbourne graduates, have put together a project looking at the “culture of fear”, the media’s use of this, and how it affects our everyday state of mind.
The outcome is a catalogue, WellBeings™ [PDF link] accompanying a specially printed newspaper, The Messenger, designed to be used with special rose-tinted spectacles - simple, yet very clever:
Feeling brave? Read the paper as usual. Feeling fragile? Put on the rose-tinted spectacles to block out the bad news stories which are printed in the same hue as the lenses so it becomes invisible.
The products in the catalogue cater for people made increasingly paranoid by aspects of modern society, by ‘normalising’ paranoia - ranging from H-ear-Phones which allow you to hear what others are saying about you, to Rear-View Mirror spectacles to allow you to keep an eye on who might be following you. As Chloë puts it:
The whole project is about questioning attitudes - should we live in fear - are we safer that way, or should we live for now and not worry about what could happen.
There are also a couple of products in there which are actually defensive weapons - a pepper spray disguised as a perfume atomiser, and house-key-cum-knuckleduster, and these seem to go beyond mere paranoia. All of these products are very plausible, and indeed, some of them are probably commercially viable. Whilst none of these is an architecture of control as such, I felt that they deserved inclusion here - pertinent to the sousveillance discussion, and also the idea of users turning products against instrusive aspects of society, from relatively simple items such as the Knee Defender (prevent the person in front of you on an aircraft reclining his or her seat) to Limor Fried’s Design Noir work on using electronic devices to create social defence mechanisms.
Equally - while perhaps not the focus of the project - the rose-tinted spectacles idea parallels closely the phenomenon of increasing self-selection of the news we expose ourselves to, as the internet and hundreds of TV channels allow segmentation like never before. The idea of a newspaper bringing readers only ‘good’ news has been tried a number of times (a recent example one-off) and has inspired some interesting pieces, but modern media permits many more coloured filters than simply rose-tinting. Clearly, to a large extent, deliberate use of this segmentation can permit intentional reinforcement, entrenchment, even inspiration of certain views and behaviours. Self-selected exposure to propaganda is a curious phenomenon, but one with enormous power.

The Consumerist’s Ben Popken outlines 







