Swoopo, a new kind of “entertainment shopping” auction site, takes Martin Shubik’s classic Dollar Auction game to a whole new, automated, mass participation level. It’s an example of the escalation of commitment, or a sunk cost fallacy, where we increase our commitment (in this case […]
Yearly archives of “2008”
Design and Behaviour : A new discussion list
I’m pleased to announce the launch of Design and Behaviour, a new discussion list / Google group: The design of products, services and environments can be used to influence behaviour, and there’s a growing appreciation of the possibilities for social benefit, especially in environmentally sensitive […]
Clearing the tabs
Ballardian » ‘Content in their little prisons’: J.G. Ballard on ‘The Towers’ "For example, in cities, the degree of criminality is affected by liberty of movement; it’s higher in culs-de-sac. And high-rises are culs-de-sac: two thousand people jammed together in the air…" (tags: Ballardian Ballard […]
Clearing the tabs
The Five Stages of Collapse | Dmitry Orlov "And so it is with a great many things. We can wait until the lifestyle that is killing the planet and is making us crazy and sick is no longer physically possible, or we can opt out […]
Invitation to participate
For the last few weeks I’ve been setting up and running the first few trials of the ‘Design with Intent Method’, the design/innovation tool I’ve (embarrassingly sporadically) talked about on the blog over the last year. It’s essentially an innovation method to help designers given […]
On ‘Design and Behaviour’ this week: Do you own your stuff? And a strange council-run ‘Virtual World for young people’
GPS-aided repo and product-service systems Ryan Calo of Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society brought up the new phenomenon of GPS-aided car repossession and the implications for the concepts of property and privacy: A group of car dealers in Oregon apparently attached GPS devices to […]
{In|Ex}clusive Design
Giving with one hand, and taking away with the other. The juxtaposition of hand rails and anti-sit spikes outside this church in Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire suggests a particular configuration of design priorities: helping people climb the steps, but forbidding anyone sitting on the wall. Are the […]
Anti-homeless ‘stools’
Stuart Candy of the brilliant Sceptical Futuryst let me know about authorities in Honolulu replacing benches with round ‘stools’ to prevent homeless people sleeping at bus stops (above image from Honolulu Advertiser story): So far, the city has spent about $11,000 on the seating initiative, […]
Architecture and Intent
ErnÅ‘ Goldfinger on his Trellick Tower: I built skyscrapers for people to live in there and now they messed them up – disgusting. Discuss.