An awareness of architectures of control in products, especially digital technology, has been growing significantly over the past few years. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of the strongest reactions have propagated in and been disseminated through internet communities, especially those at the intersection of technology and policy […]

Eric von Hippel of MIT has charted the phenomenon of user-led innovation, and how this has benefited both companies and users, in The Sources of Innovation [57], published in 1988, and, most recently, Democratizing Innovation* [58]. As discussed in the ‘Reactions’ section of this site, […]

Two precedents from the interface between design, business and psychology are especially relevant here. First, Donald Norman’s influential The Psychology of Everyday Things, later republished as The Design of Everyday Things [32], formalised and analysed much of the accumulated wisdom surrounding user behaviour and interaction […]

To some extent, the desire of companies to control what consumers do with their products has parallels with attempts at price discrimination in industries such as freight transportation, and, especially, telecommunications. Andrew Odlyzko of the University of Minnesota’s Digital Technology Center points out that telecommunications […]

Lawrence Lessig, currently of Stanford Law School, has been at the forefront of much recent and current debate on intellectual property and how the internet is constructed and regulated. His books, Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace [29], The Future of Ideas [51] and more […]

Many academic fields touch on areas relevant to this subject, from architecture to computer science. Perhaps the closest single exposition of many of the pertinent concepts is Langdon Winner’s 1986 “Do artifacts* have politics?” in which he discusses the idea that: “The machines, structures, and […]

Printer cartridges are a consumer product category with a variety of architectures of control exhibiting characteristics discussed on this site. Refills for printer cartridges, both DIY and factory-refilled, can be rendered useless by some built-in architectures of control Aside from the obvious economic lock-in (the […]

This diagram is a simplistic attempt to place some of the architectures of control detailed on this site into a plane representing the strategic intentions behind them: the dimensions are intended commercial benefit, and intended social benefit. Please click to open in a new window […]

Reviewing the examples across different sectors, a noticeable tension emerges between architectures of control with primarily commercial benefit intentions, and primarily social benefit intentions. For example, it is hard to argue that there was any intended social benefit in DVD region coding [46], but there […]

Whilst architectures of control in digital systems can be complex, there are many very simple control architectures in products which are either self-evident, or become so once the design intention is explained. Restriction of access Some of the most obvious involve attempts to restrict access […]

The design field where architectures of control have become most firmly established is software; to a large extent any application which affords the user a limited range of behaviours is, by definition, an architecture of control. This may seem obvious, but it is not a […]

First, it is worth looking at the broad range of architectures of control both inside and outside of product design. The use of the term ‘architecture’ is no coincidence, since it is in the planned systems which people inhabit–buildings and environments–that the idea of shaping […]

Architectures of control are features, structures or methods of operation designed into physical products, software, buildings, city layouts–or indeed any planned system with which a user interacts–which are intended to enforce, reinforce, or restrict certain modes of user behaviour. While the use of architectures of […]