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"…a train with individual passenger compartments… "something that everyone manages to do on the Tube without the need for physical walls"… Public transport without all the downsides of it being public." Thanks to Mags L Halliday for the link.
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"What if a sign did not simply tout new movies, sodas, and celebrity babies in one-way feeds, but instead revealed something unique about the building, its occupants, or its environment?" (via cityofsound)
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Not sure why this wasn't already in the blogroll, been reading Dan's stuff for quite a while and always impressed.
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"Reports from design and technology conferences and events".
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"Reflections and reporting on the relationship of design, business and society."
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"Slanty Design is kind of anti-affordance, a difficulty-of-use employed to achieve certain design decisions. I think even the acknowledgment of such tools mark a maturity of interaction design: it’s not solely about making things easy to use. (Just, perhaps, mostly?) Unfortunately, the use of slanty design isn’t always to encourage better behavior. Sometimes it’s just greed." Interesting example discussed by Chris Noessel.
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"An interesting example of an extreme user was this deaf guy I saw the other day at the train station, walking and gesticulating in front of his video cell-phone. If you map the use of video-communication on cell-phone you get a very low usage of the feature in general but that guy would be an exception."
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"Defensible space produced with lower-end means in Cuzco, Peru: shards of glass and cactus as a deterrent to jump over that wall."
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Very much looking forward to reading Anne Galloway's PhD dissertation, A Brief History of the Future of Urban Computing and Locative Media.
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"Blog of the Resource Efficiency Knowledge Transfer Network, highlighting issues, viewpoints and oddities encountered by the RE KTN team in promoting knowledge transfer leading to more resource efficient industry and commerce in the UK."
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This, children, is what we call a _false dilemma_. It's an easy trick to use when we're trying to push an argument that won't stand up otherwise.
The IT Crowd did it better - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTbX1aMajow -
Nice circumvention
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"You don’t need to take a course or learn a new software package to design for flow. In fact, you’re probably already doing it. Begin by considering the desired outcome of every interaction and then removing everything that distracts the user from accomplishing that outcome." Very useful article by Trevor van Gorp.
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Trevor van Gorp "exploring and understanding the “heart” of design; the effects of design on the emotional affect created by people’s interaction with products, brands and services."
Architecting and designing
Published August 7th, 2008 in Architecture, Built Environment, Design, Design philosophy, Design with Intent, Designers, Interaction design, Product design and Terminology. 3 Comments 
Seth Godin asks ‘Is architect a verb?’, and makes an interesting distinction between design and architecture (emphases mine):
Design carries a lot of baggage related to aesthetics. We say something is well-designed if it looks good. There are great designs that don’t look good, certainly, but it’s really easy to get caught up in a bauhaus, white space, font-driven, Ideo-envy way of thinking about design.
So I reserve “architect” to describe the intentional arrangement of design elements to get a certain result. You can architect a computer server set up to make it more efficient. You can architect a train station to get more people per minute through the turnstiles. More interesting, you can architect a business model or a pricing structure to make it far more effective at generating the behavior you’re looking for.
Seth’s definition of ‘architecting’ is very closely aligned to what I’ve termed ‘design with intent’: strategic design intended to result in certain user behaviour. My definition’s a bit narrower, probably, with the focus on influencing user behaviour, techniques for doing that, and the rights and wrongs of it, but there’s a big parallel there. The key thing is that both architecting and designing with intent are deliberate (and often deliberative, too, in the Aristotelian sense - thanks to Kristian Tørning for this point). There is some reasoning, some intended outcome, driving them. As we’ve seen before, not everyone likes the term ‘architecture’ (or ‘architectures’) being used outside the pure building and environmental design context. But it’s useful because it clearly implies the planned, deliberate nature in a way that, say, ’structure’ doesn’t necessarily.
Of course, many designers, especially interaction designers, would argue that they always design ‘with intent’ anyway. They’re always ‘architecting’: considering the relations between system behaviour, user behaviour, users’ goals, and so on is the very basis of the human-centred/user-centred turn in design. But that doesn’t negate Seth’s point: ‘design’ does have a lot of aesthetic baggage. It may be useful - and persuasive - baggage sometimes, but it can serve to mask what design really is, or what it can be.
Seth’s final point draws a number of other aspects together:
Architecture, for me anyway, involves intention, game theory, systems thinking and relentless testing and improvement. Fine with me if you want to call it design, just don’t forget to do it.
Based on my research so far, I think we need to add ecological psychology and behavioural economics to that list, at the very least.
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Randi and Teller among the authors. [No longer behind paywall: thanks, Cory]
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"As magicians have long known and neuroscientists are increasingly discovering, human perception is a jury-rigged apparatus, full of gaps and easily manipulated."
For the Design with Intent research, techniques of misdirection are especially worth examining. Richard Wiseman & Peter Lamont's "Magic in Theory" addresses this pretty well I think. -
"The RSA is launching a new project to ask how insights from cognitive and behavioural sciences can help us respond to pressing social challenges… we’re looking at how insights from a range of disciplines, including but not limited to neuroscience, behavioural economics, anthropology and social psychology may apply to concrete public policy challenges."
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(via Michal Migurski) "Much of our thinking is two dimensional, and seldom gets beyond the three dimensional level of a side, elevation and plan drawing. There are not many three dimensional mechanisms - most, like Watt's linkage, are plane solutions. The differential, like the one in the ancient Chinese South-facing Chariot, is a beautiful exception. The idea did not appear in the West until the nineteenth century. Yet it cannot be described in words. Let any reader who does not know the differential's motions ask an engineer how it works. It cannot even be sketched without imagining the paper rotating end over end."
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"So a “choice architect” is basically anyone that organizes “the context in which people make choices.” This is so immensely broad as to be almost useless… And if you invite people to a party where alcohol is available, the music is bumpin’, and the lights are low, you are choice architect. Everyone is a choice architect some of the time."
Salt licked?
Published August 4th, 2008 in Britain, Bureaucracy, Choice Architecture, Consumer rights, Defaults, Design, Design philosophy, Design with Intent, Do artifacts have politics?, Forcing functions, Good design, Health and safety, Hidden persuaders, Interaction design, Packaging design, Poka-yoke, Political design, Product design, Public money, Sneaky, Social engineering and User Psychology. 8 Comments
UPDATE: See the detailed response below from Peter of Gateshead Council, which clarifies, corrects and expands upon some of the spin given by the Mail articles. The new shakers were supplied to the chip shop staff for use behind the counter: “Our main concern was around the amount of salt put on by staff seasoning food on behalf of customers before wrapping it up… Our observations… confirmed that customers were receiving about half of the recommended daily intake of salt in this way. We piloted some reduced hole versions with local chip shops who all found that none of their customers complained about the reduced saltiness.”
A number of councils in England have given fish & chip shops replacement salt shakers with fewer holes - from the Daily Mail:
Research has suggested that slashing the holes from the traditional 17 to five could cut the amount people sprinkle on their food by more than half.
And so at least six councils have ordered five-hole shakers – at taxpayers’ expense – and begun giving them away to chip shops and takeaways in their areas. Leading the way has been Gateshead Council, which spent 15 days researching the subject of salty takeaways before declaring the new five-hole cellars the solution.
Officers collected information from businesses, obtained samples of fish and chips, measured salt content and ‘carried out experiments to determine how the problem of excessive salt being dispensed could be overcome by design’. They decided that the five-hole pots would reduce the amount of salt being used by more than 60 per cent yet give a ‘visually acceptable sprinkling’ that would satisfy the customer.
OK. This is interesting. This is where the unit bias, defaults, libertarian paternalism and industrial design come together, in the mundanity of everyday interaction. It’s Brian Wansink’s ‘mindless margin’ being employed strategically, politically - and just look at the reaction it’s got from the public (and from Littlejohn). A BBC story about a similar initiative in Norfolk also gives us the industry view:
A spokesman for the National Federation of Fish Friers called the scheme a “gimmick” and said customers would just shake the containers more.
Graham Adderson, 62, who owns the Downham Fryer, in Downham Market, said: “I think the scheme is hilarious. If you want to put salt on your fish and chips and there are only four holes, you’re just going to spend longer putting more on.”
I’m assuming Gateshead Council’s research took account of this effect, although there are so many ways that users’ habits could have been formed through prior experience that this ’solution’ won’t apply to all users. There might be some customers who always put more salt on, before even tasting their food. There might be people who almost always think the fish & chips they get are too heavily salted anyway - plenty of people, anecdotally at least, used to buy Smith’s Salt ‘n’ Shake and not use the salt at all.
And there are probably plenty of people who will, indeed, end up consuming less salt, because of the heuristic of “hold salt shaker over food for n seconds” built up over many years of experience.
Overall: I actually quite like this idea: it’s clever, simple, and non-intrusive, but I can see how the interpretation, the framing, is crucial. Clearly, when presented in the way that the councils media have done here (as a government programme to eliminate customer choice, and force us all down the road decided by health bureaucrats), the initiative’s likely to elicit an angry reaction from a public sick of a “nanny state” interfering in every area of our lives. Politicians jumping on the Nudge bandwagon need to be very, very careful that this isn’t the way their initiatives are perceived and portrayed by the press (and many of them will be, of course): it needs to be very, very clear how each such measure actually benefits the public, and that message needs to be given extremely persuasively.
Final thought: Many cafés, canteens and so on have used sachets of salt, that customers apply themselves, for many years. The decision made by the manufacturers about the size of these portions is a major determinant of how much salt is used, because of the unit bias (people assume that one portion is the ‘right’ amount), and, just as with washing machine detergent, manipulation of this portion size could well be used as part of a strategy to influence the quantity used by customers. But would a similar salt sachet strategy (perhaps driven by manufacturers rather than councils) have provoked similar reactions? I’m not sure that it would. ‘Nanny manufacturer’ is less despised than ‘nanny state’, I think, certainly in the UK.
What do you think?
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Interesting writing, but the Issuu interface is completely unusable.
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"Much of our research started out as an attempt to understand the similarities and differences to what we already knew in order to create products and services that are more in tune with local markets. But increasingly we've had our eyes opened to the sheer ingenuity of people who figure out ways of doing a lot with very little – highly relevant for a planet having to make stark choices about sparse resources."
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Dan Goldstein & Nassim Nicholas Taleb. "We make the distinction between "ecological" uncertainty, i.e., the type of uncertainty we witness in the real world, and the "ludic" randomness, the one in games and in laboratory setups. A series of experiments… aim, simply, at uncovering and cataloguing consequential errors that enter real-world decision making. In other words, errors that matter for real-life."
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"The implication is that all (or most) professional training results to some extent in a distortion of the way the professional views the world. "When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail"."
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"Decision research in Marketing, Psychology, Economics, Medicine, Law, Management, Public Policy & Computer Science". We need to add "Interaction Design" to that list.
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"The idea of usability being fundamentally different than persuasion is deliberately artificial." Interesting to see another different approach to persuasion and design. I think John's "Design Guided Paths" description best matches what I'm investigating here.
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"Indeed, after a few days of research we found out that the track wasn’t leaked by pirates, but by Josh Klemme, the manager of the band."
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"A blog about how we might feel tomorrow."
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"Relevant articles deal with normative, descriptive, and/or prescriptive analyses of human judgments and decisions. "
The asymmetry of the indescribable
Published August 1st, 2008 in 1984, Choice Architecture, Defaults, Design philosophy, Design with Intent, Education, Philosophy of control and Vague rhetoric. 6 CommentsLike the itchy label in my shirt, there’s something which has been niggling away at the back of my mind, ever since I started being exposed to ‘academic fields’, and boundaries between ’subjects’ (probably as a young child). I’m sure others have expressed it much better, and, ironically, it probably has a name itself, and a whole discipline devoted to studying it.
It’s this:
The set of things/ideas/concepts/relationships/solutions/sets that have been named/defined is much, much, much smaller than the set of actual things/ideas/concepts/relationships/solutions/sets.
And yet without a name or definition for what you’re researching, you’ll find it difficult to research it, or at least to tell anyone what you’re doing. The set of things we can comprehend researching is thus limited to what we’ve already defined.
How do we ever advance, then? Are we not just forever sub-dividing the same limited field with which we’re already familiar? Or am I missing something? Is this a kind of (obvious) generalisation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?
Relating it to my current research, as I ought to, the problems of choice architecture, defaults, framing, designed-in perceived affordances and so on are clearly special cases of the idea: the decision options people perceive as available to them can be, and are, used strategically to limit what decisions people make and how they understand things (e.g. Orwell’s Newspeak). But whether it’s done deliberately or not, the problem exists anyway.
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“…infrastructures simultaneously shape and are shaped by — in other words, co-construct — the condition of modernity… To be modern is to live within and by means of infrastructures, and therefore to inhabit, uneasily, the intersection of these mul
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Barry Schwartz on defaults and choice architecture. Clever cartoon too.
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“So designers, choose the choices carefully. Whatever users get when they don’t make a choice is probably what most people will end up with. And contrary to popular belief, most people don’t actually want to make more choices.”
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“Recency bias is a tool we can use to improve user comprehension and overall satisfaction. By considering the sequence of information… and the (intentional?) placement of distractors, we can avoid common pitfalls in user judgments and decision making.”
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When will the entertainment industry learn?
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“Today, if you’re an urban dweller in a city like London, New York or like me, living here in Tokyo you probably make a conscious effort to disconnect.” Thanks to Mayo for the link.
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“Tapping into young people’s already considerable status anxiety and offering rewards that can only be realised by shopping is a recipe for a lifetime of misery, not… adults whose instinct is to ask, “How can I help?” rather than, “What’s in i
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Extremely interesting wide-ranging article by Ralph Caplan about signage, correcting errors in design, usability, perceived affordances, and so on. Thanks to Mayo for the link.
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“We want to avoid, or at least minimize, the startling systematic mistakes that science is discovering. If we know the common patterns of error or self-deception, maybe we can work around them ourselves, or build social structures for smarter groups.”
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“In Japan, the camera on mobile phones can be as high as 5.2M Pixels and they could be used for sneak shots such as spy shots and/or dirty pictures… Japanese manufacturer have stopped the disabling of shutter sound in silent mode” Via dev.null.org
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Appalling usability, use/damage marks and an officious anti-photography security guard - so many interesting things rolled into one story!
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“When people are made to be self-aware, they are likelier to stop and think about what they are doing… a shift away from acting on autopilot toward more desirable ways of behaving.” Via nudges.wordpress.com
Pretty Cuil Privacy
Published July 28th, 2008 in Business model, Consumer rights, Design philosophy, Design with Intent, Digital rights, Good design, Google, Internet economics, Privacy, Service design and Surveillance. 3 Comments
New search engine Cuil has an interesting privacy policy (those links might not work right now due to the load). They’re apparently not going to track individual users’ searches at all, which, in comparison to Google’s behaviour, is quite a difference. As TechCrunch puts it:
User IP addresses are not recorded to their servers, they say, and cookies are not used to associate a computer with queries. The data is simply dumped as it is created. That means user data cannot be turned over to others, whether its via blind stupidity or lawsuits.
This strategy’s similar to an issue Scott Craver discussed a couple of years ago as part of his ‘privacy ceiling’ concept (I covered it a bit here at the time): effectively, whatever information you collect could become a liability for you at some point, so if you don’t need it, design the system so it simply doesn’t collect it in the first place.
