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, […]
A ‘Behaviour Change Barometer’
This is a kind of exploration of some ideas I worked on a while ago as part of my research, and have only just come back to, in order to tidy them up a bit. I’m putting it online as a way – perhaps – […]
A year in
It’s nearly a year since I started my PhD, (and coming up to three years since this blog was launched). Last week I had my end-of-year review, and, while I don’t often post about the minutiae of being a research student on the blog, I […]
‘Design | Behaviour: Making it Happen’ Seminar, 17th October
Debra Lilley, who runs the very useful Design-Behaviour website, sends details of an interesting forthcoming seminar at Loughborough University: Design | Behaviour: Making it Happen! The 13th Sustainable Design Network Seminar Design | Behaviour: Making it Happen! will be held on the 17th October 2008 […]
The detail of everyday interaction
Understanding what people really do when they carry out some ‘simple’ task, as opposed to what designers assume they do, is important. Even something as mundane as boiling a kettle to make a cup of tea or coffee is fraught with variability, slips, mistaken assumptions […]
Skinner and the Mousewrap
Dontclick.it, an interesting interface design experiment by Alex Frank, included this amusing idea, the Mousewrap, to ‘train’ users not to click any more “through physical pain”. It did make me think: is the use of anti-sit spikes on window sills, ledges, and so on, or […]
links for 2008-07-29
Infrastructure and Modernity: Paul N Edwards [PDF] “…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 […]
My PhD
Dan Lockton: Design with Intent: A design pattern toolkit for environmental & social behaviour change 2007-13, Brunel Design Research Centre, Brunel University, London Supervisors: Professor David Harrison, Brunel University and Professor Neville Stanton, University of Southampton. Download the thesis (PDF, 14MB) Abstract: This thesis describes […]
Pretty Cuil Privacy
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: […]
links for 2008-07-04
RepRap – The Guardian “[Adrian Bowyer] doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life in court trying to prevent people from doing with the machine the one thing it was designed to do. “You are brought to the point where you have to say […]