UPDATE: This 2-page PDF (produced summer 2008) introduces the research I’ve taken the plunge, and will be starting a PhD in September at Brunel University, Uxbridge, in the School of Engineering & Design. The chosen subject incorporates both a formal investigation and review of certain […]
All posts filed under “Designers”
Process friction
Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah kindly sent me a link to this article by Ben Hyde: I once had a web product that failed big-time. A major contributor to that failure was tedium of getting new users through the sign-up process. Each screen they had to step triggered […]
Runnymede Memorial: Part 1
This post is the start of a series that will only be of interest to a few readers, but it’s about a subject that means a lot to me, and about a place which, in one way or another, has had an impact on design, […]
Anti-user seating in Oxford
Top two photos: A bench on Cornmarket Street, Oxford; Lower two photos: A bus stop seat perch on Castle Street. While from a very narrow specification point-of-view ‘they do their job’, what utter contempt for users these two seating examples demonstrate! The benches on Cornmarket […]
Who serves whom
Joel Johnson: Stop buying products that serve any other master than you. (via Boing Boing ) Bruce Schneier also wrote something along similar lines last year, though the context was different: When technology serves its owners, it is liberating. When it is designed to serve […]
What I’ve learned so far as a freelance designer/engineer/maker: Part 1
This is the first in a series of essays where I’ll try to look at some of the realities of working freelance in this field; I hope these will be interesting and possibly useful to others contemplating this kind of work. Please note, these are […]
Plug: Wilson Brothers’ blog
Bit of a design-related plug: London designer/maker Ben Wilson (with whom I’m currently working on a project for Sir Clive Sinclair) and his brothers, Oscar and Luke, have just launched their own collaborative photo blog, which I helped set up using WordPress.com, a mildly modified […]
Key issue
Is this simply poor design or a deliberate feature? A friend tells me of his irritation with his Sony Ericsson W880i’s ‘internet’ key, which is positioned such that it frequently gets pressed accidentally when pressing the buttons above and below it – “three or four […]
Forcing functions designed to increase product consumption
A few days ago, Tim Quinn of Dangerous Curve posted an interesting observation on the Simple Control in Products page: “This may not be what you had in mind, but I immediately thought of such things as toothpaste pumps that ‘meter’ use to insure the […]
Use of RFID in DRM
Via Dave Farber’s Interesting People, a brief New Scientist article outlines Sony’s continuing obsession with restricting and controlling its customers (the last one didn’t go too well): “A patent filed by Sony last week suggests it may once again be considering preventing consumers making “too […]
The Privacy Ceiling
Scott Craver of the University of Binghamton has a very interesting post summarising the concept of a ‘privacy ceiling’: “This is an economic limit on privacy violation by companies, owing to the liability of having too much information about (or control over) users.” It’s the […]
Dilemma of horns
I was woken up (along with, I expect, lots of others) at about 5am today by a driver sounding his/her horn in the road outside – an arrogant two-second burst – then another replying (perhaps) with a slightly feeble one-second tone. I don’t know why; […]