The Main Reading Room, Library of Congress. Image from CIRLA. In this article from Communications of the ACM from January 2007, Russell Beale uses the term slanty design to describe “design that purposely reduces aspects of functionality or usability”: It originated from an apocryphal story […]
Yearly archives of “2007”
Do you really need to print that?
This is not difficult to do, once you know how. Of course, it’s not terribly useful, since a) most people don’t read the display on a printer unless an error occurs, or b) you’re only likely to see it once you’ve already sent something to […]
Full, tilt
Jan Hoekstra’s Balancing Bowls for Royal VKB (via Boing Boing) are an interesting ‘portion control/guidance’ solution – as Cory Doctorow puts it: The tilt is tiny, all of 3 degrees, and the net effect is very satisfying — you gradually add snacks to the “light” […]
Destroy everything you touch
We can’t help but be familiar with the concept of ‘malicious code’ in the context of computer security and programming, but in general the idea of products or technology which, as they’re used, sabotage or degrade the performance of a ‘rival’, is intriguing and not […]
fulminate: News from Runnymede
This post’s overdue but I wanted to have some real news (and images) rather than pure speculation. Following Brunel’s sale of the Runnymede Campus to Oracle back in May, Oracle appointed John Thompson & Partners as architects to explore options and develop a plan for […]
I believe in mirror-queues
Meagan Call has written a very interesting piece examining the technique used in some (women’s) public restrooms* of moving the mirrors to the wall near the entrance/exit, rather than behind the sinks as might be expected (and is usually found in mens’ facilities), to lessen […]
Design with Intent
I’ve recently been doing a vast amount of reading (and writing a brief paper) on architectures of control-type strategies and precedents, from lots of different fields, as a precursor to planning the first practical parts of my PhD research, and in trying to classify and […]
What is Design with Intent?
Design can be used to influence users’ behaviour. From the layout of shopping malls to digital rights management, our everyday lives are full of examples of products, systems and environments which have been designed to shape, guide or control — influence — our behaviour, using […]
Dan Lockton: Writing
This page has now moved here – keeping things in one place to make it easier to update.
Dr Dan Lockton
E-mail me: dan@danlockton.co.uk I’ve moved the details that used to be on this page to new About me and Publications pages.
Deliberately creating worry
Swedish creativity lecturer Fredrik Härén mentions an interesting architecture of control anecdote in his The Idea Book: One of the cafés in an international European airport was often full. The problem was that people sat nursing their coffees for a long time as they waited […]
Welcome, new readers
Welcome to visitors from 9rules and We Make Money Not Art. With a diverse set of new readers, and the start of a new year, I should probably try to explain, succinctly, what this blog’s about. Most of the posts look at ‘architectures of control‘ […]