These are the suggested mechanisms applicable to User follows process or path, performing actions in a specified sequence - they fall roughly into three ‘approaches’. In this post, I’m going to examine the System element approach.

System element approach

This approach includes mechanisms relating to the layout and properties of system elements, hence all technical rather than human factors.

Placing, Spacing and Orientation - how system elements are laid out - are some of the most fundamental mechanisms a designer can employ to help a user to follow a process or path in the intended sequence, and can be used both in the ‘real’ world and, as metaphors, in software. Movement or oscillation, as an ‘action’ property of system elements, which may involve changing their placing/spacing/orientation, can also be used to help achieve similar aims.

Placing

Placing may be implemented as simply as arranging interactive elements (functions, buttons, shops, products on shelves - effectively, anything) in sequence so that a user interacts (sees / notices / experiences / uses) them in the ‘right’ order. This might involve actually hiding one element behind another so that the first ‘must’ be dealt with before progressing to the next (or only displaying the second element once the first has been dealt with), but often this is not necessary: users will tend to interact with elements in a predictable sequence, at least where it is clear which direction the sequence is meant to progress (compare reading directions in different alphabets, for example, and the effect this has on the layout of interfaces).

Example: The elements of Amazon’s order process, revealed to the user in sequence

Placing can also involve arranging (non-interactive) elements to ‘channel’ users along a path in an intended sequence - walls, fences and guard rails are obvious architectural examples, but there are more subtle ones too, such as the layout of some casinos in which winners are ‘funnelled’ past many lures on their way to a single cashier.

Example: Guard rails are placed to channel pedestrians away from crossing at the mouth of a road junction

Spacing

Spacing - deliberate separation of system elements in space - can also be used strategically to cause users to follow a path or sequence of operations or interactions. For example many supermarkets are laid out with common items such as milk and bread at the back of the store, meaning that shoppers pass many other shelves of items (with potential for impulse purchase) on the way to their ‘target’, and on the way back to the checkouts at the front of the store.

Spacing can also be used to cause users to follow procedures requiring a delay between performing operations - the ‘on’ switch for a lathe may be spaced far enough away from the chuck that it is impossible for the operator’s fingers to be in a dangerous position as the device is switched on. Along similar lines, spacing light switches for different parts of a corridor or stairway apart so that they must each be switched on in sequence individually when needed (rather than allowing users to switch them all on at once) may reduce unnecessary electricity use.

Example: Dairy items are often positioned to drive traffic to the rear of a supermarket. Image from wander.lust

Orientation

Orientation is necessarily related to placing and spacing - the relative angle or attitude of system elements can be used as a mechanism for encouraging or channelling users to follow a path or perform actions in sequence. A trivial example is the use of angled walls to ‘funnel’ pedestrians along a particular path. It can also be used to cause users themselves to change their orientation in response, where this is part of an intended sequence of user behaviour - the staggered pedestrian crossings which make sure users turn to face the direction of oncoming traffic, as mentioned in Part 1, use the changing orientation of the walkway to change users’ orientation.

Example: A staggered pedestrian crossing designed so that users face oncoming traffic. Image from the UK Highway Code.

Movement or oscillation

Movement or oscillation may involve changing the placing/spacing/orientation of system elements, and can be applied in a physical or metaphorical sense. A moving indicator which guides the user through a process or sequence, or indeed, brings system elements which require interaction to the user (or routes them past), encourages (or forces) following procedures in the ‘right’ order.

Consider this mechanism as a dynamic implementation of placing/spacing/orientation: it has the potential to control much more fully the order in which users are exposed to objects or functions. The most obvious examples are conveyors on production lines, bringing components or products to stationary workers in the right sequence, but even museum exhibits such as the Crown Jewels may be displayed in a rotating or constantly moving case, which displays them to visitors in a certain order and reduces the possibility of undesired interactions.

Example: A conveyor (such as this on a Krispy Kreme doughnut preparation line) brings products or components to workers in the right sequence. Image from Silversprite

In part 3, we’ll look at the Poka-yoke approach to getting someone to do things in a particular order.

Back in January, I introduced the Design with Intent method on the blog. I’ve been developing this since then, and, suitably tested and refined, it should form the first stage of the PhD.

Essentially, the DwI Method is intended to be a structured ’suggestion engine’, where a target behaviour is put in one end, and a range of applicable mechanisms and design techniques, both physical and psychological, come out of the other. The aim is for it to be useful to designers, engineers, architects, policy-makers, and planners of all sorts, who aim to try and shape or change users’ behaviour in some way - and also useful to users in understanding how their behaviour might be manipulated or shaped, for their benefit or someone else’s, by the products, systems and environments around them.

The post in January looked at some of the different design techniques applicable to the target behaviour ‘No access, use or occupation, in a specific manner, by any user’, through the example of anti-homeless benches, and received some really useful feedback from readers (thanks!), as well as forcing me to think more clearly about how the method is structured. Since then the method has evolved considerably, but it’s not yet in the form I want to publish. However, I thought it would be interesting to share an example of applying the method as it currently stands, to a different target behaviour: getting someone to do things in a particular order.

The target behaviour: Introduction

Here I’ve identified a target über-behaviour - We want to shape the way a user follows a process or path - which is inherent to many design problems. There are then (at present) three target sub-behaviours, each of which is subtly different, with different design techniques applicable. In this series of posts I’m going to elaborate on User follows process or path, performing actions in a specified sequence.

Often we (designers/planners/engineers/architects) want the user to do things in a certain order, or follow a path, and are aiming to use the design of the system to help achieve that. The process or path can involve simple spatial sequencing (e.g. making sure shoppers walk past certain items on their way to the checkout), software metaphors for physical procedures (e.g. disabling the ‘Next’ button on a software wizard until required options have been confirmed), or a combination of software logic with physical space (e.g. making sure the user removes his or her bank card from an ATM before the cash is dispensed).

This target behaviour also applies to many safety measures: staggered pedestrian crossings which make sure users turn to face the direction of oncoming traffic, microwave ovens which will not start until the door is closed, cars which will not start unless the clutch is depressed or seat-belt buckled, cars where the ignition key cannot be removed until the automatic transmission is in ‘Park’ mode, machine tools which will not start until a guard is in place, and so on.

Ecodesign applications

Possible ecodesign applications may follow similar lines to the safety measures - particularly, increasing the likelihood that operations are performed in the ‘most efficient’ sequence. A kettle that requires users to pre-select the amount of water required before boiling it, for example, such as the Product Creation Eco-Kettle, aims to have users consider how much boiling water they actually need at the ‘right’ point in the sequence - before boiling. A car’s air conditioning system could require the windows to be fully closed before operating. A bathroom sink could require the plug to be in place before the tap could be left in a ‘running’ position.

Interfaces which suggest the ‘most efficient’ action to the user, at the right point (e.g. a rev-counter-linked light on a car dashboard indicating that it’s time to change gear, as formerly used on a number of Volvo models), can also help encourage users to follow the intended sequence of actions.

Applicable mechanisms/techniques

The DwI method suggests a variety of design techniques applicable to this target behaviour, which fall roughly into three ‘approaches’:

I’ll deal with each of these approaches, with examples of the mechanisms/techniques in action, in the next few posts in this series. Part 2 is up now.

Loughborough’s Dr Debra Lilley, who has done extensive research into designing for behavioural change, has just launched an excellent new website, Design-Behaviour, which brings together her research findings and some great examples of behaviour-changing products from different fields to illustrate the approaches identified. The site is:

[A] resource specifically developed to support designers and engineers in exploring how design (in its broadest sense) can influence user behaviour to reduce the social and environmental impacts of products during use… You can use this site to find information about design-led approaches for behavioural change and learn how others have applied these approaches in practice.

Most of the examples on the site relate to design for sustainable behaviour, but there are also some aiming to curb ‘inappropriate’ social behaviour, such as impolite mobile phone use. The next step planned for the site is a discussion of some of the ethical issues surrounding behaviour change and the persuasion-coercion dimension - this is especially important and will be a welcome addition.

Thanks to Debra for letting me know.

One of the major tensions I find with Wordpress is between the benefits of an upgrade (which may be invisible to the user) and the downsides of a load of plugins suddenly malfunctioning. When you have many plugins activated, and have designed the blog around the functionality some of them provide, the cascade of failures and odd effects which occur with an upgrade can be quite a lot of hassle; I wonder to what extent this tension controls (holds back) the rate at which bloggers do upgrade, and hence allows security holes to persist. Still, I guess I can always get a refund if I don’t like it.

Some bloggers seem to be permanently in the right state of mind to rattle off insightful, quality posts every day or couple of days. I’m not one of those people; I should probably try and even out the bursts and lulls a bit by scheduling some posts to appear, in advance, but that always feels a bit like cheating.

Aside from all of the above, in the last two months I’ve gone on holiday, had my Reliant Scimitar very nearly written off by a BT Openworld van driving into the back of me at a roundabout, negotiated with BT to get a fair price for compensation, got the car back and (slowly) got it legal again, if not pretty yet, got an allotment with my girlfriend, built a shed, dealt with a failing hard drive, been stung by fuel prices and taken the plunge to get started on the electric car project at last (but with a Reliant Fox rather than a Bond Minicar - for the first project at least), acquired said Fox, replaced the alternator to enable driving to work each day, spent too long experimenting with a GP2X F200 and continued refining and developing the DwI Method towards being testable. Fixing and getting back to the blog properly was frequently close to the top of my priority list, but that priority list was frequently knocked over and scattered across the floor by other problems which required immediate resolution.

The critical path is all over the place. I realise I need a better system for organising myself to blog consistently and frequently, and deal with all the enquiries and comments I get, and am working to try and achieve that. The stream of very kind and helpful suggestions and links that readers have sent me over the last few weeks really does demonstrate that people enjoy the site - which is a fantastic motivation in itself. I will do better!

P.S. The ultra-brief paper for Persuasive 2008, Design with Intent: Persuasive Technology in a Wider Context [PDF, 169kb], is now available in a self-archived preprint version. It will appear in H. Oinas-Kukkonen et al. (Eds.): PERSUASIVE 2008, LNCS 5033, pp. 274 – 278, 2008. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008.

I also thought it was worth uploading the short proposal which helped me get accepted to the doctoral consortium which precedes the conference - Design for Sustainable Behaviour [PDF, 124kb]. This is a summary of the PhD project so far, although the text explains the work specifically in the ‘Persuasive Technology’ context appropriate to the conference.

Making the user more efficient: Design for sustainable behaviour [PDF, 160kb] is a brief review of approaches to designing products and systems which could shape or change users’ behaviour in an environmentally friendly way; if you’ve followed this blog, there’s probably little new in it, but it’s (hopefully) a useful summary. (At present that PDF is hosted on this website, but once Brunel allows me access to deposit papers in its institutional repository, BURA, I’ll change the above link. UPDATED: Changed link 2nd May)

Abstract: User behaviour is a significant determinant of a product’s environmental impact; while engineering advances permit increased efficiency of product operation, the user’s decisions and habits ultimately have a major effect on the energy or other resources used by the product. There is thus a need to change users’ behaviour. A range of design techniques developed in diverse contexts suggest opportunities for engineers, designers and other stakeholders working in the field of sustainable innovation to affect users’ behaviour at the point of interaction with the product or system, in effect ‘making the user more efficient’.

Approaches to changing users’ behaviour from a number of fields are reviewed and discussed, including: strategic design of affordances and behaviour-shaping constraints to control or affect energy or other resource-using interactions; the use of different kinds of feedback and persuasive technology techniques to encourage or guide users to reduce their environmental impact; and context-based systems which use feedback to adjust their behaviour to run at optimum efficiency and reduce the opportunity for user-affected inefficiency. Example implementations in the sustainable engineering and ecodesign field are suggested and discussed.

Keywords: ecodesign; sustainability; managing use; managing consumption;
behaviour change; sustainable innovation; persuasive technology

Until it appears in the journal (probably towards the end of 2008) I’m not sure what the guidance is on referencing, but something like Lockton, D., Harrison, D.J., Stanton, N.A. (2008) ‘Making the user more efficient: Design for sustainable behaviour’, To appear in: International Journal of Sustainable Engineering (forthcoming) is probably about right.

*Required disclaimer:

This is a preprint of an article whose final and definitive form will be published in the International Journal of Sustainable Engineering. © 2008 Taylor & Francis; International Journal of Sustainable Engineering is available online at: http://journalsonline.tandf.co.uk/

The Mosquito anti-teenager sound device, which we’ve covered on this site a few times, was yesterday heavily criticised by the Children’s Commissioner for England, Sir Albert Aynsley-Green, launching the BUZZ OFF campaign in conjunction with Liberty and the National Youth Agency:

Makers and users of ultra-sonic dispersal devices are being told to “Buzz Off” today by campaigners who say the device, which emits a high-pitched sound that targets under 25 year olds, is not a fair or reasonable solution for tackling anti-social behaviour. The campaign… is calling for the end to the use of ultra-sonic dispersal device. There are estimated to be 3,500 used across the country.

The BUZZ OFF campaign will be driven by young people who have been affected by the device and will aim to provoke debate and thought amongst parents, government, businesses, the police and others about the increasingly negative way society views and deals with children and young people.

The government has said it has no plans to ban the Mosquito.

The main point here is of course that the use of the Mosquito is in effect discriminatory architecture, designed to punish/annoy/prevent/target one particular group of people, whether or not those individuals have actually done anything wrong - as Sir Albert told the BBC:

These devices are indiscriminate and target all children and young people, including babies, regardless of whether they are behaving or misbehaving.

It’s the same mentality as removing benches because you don’t like the sort of people who use benches (or demonstrated by other techniques in this area). Many different points of view on the subject have been expressed by commenters here over the last couple of years, from kids fed up with being assumed guilty, to members of the public fed up with kids hanging around and intimidating people.

As with blue lighting in public toilets, the Mosquito is unlikely to solve the ‘problem’ at hand: it will simply move it elsewhere. It’s displacing the symptom rather than curing the illness, and - as has been pointed out in numerous recent news stories - it exemplifies a pervasive antipathy towards young people which is rather disturbing (I mentioned this before in reference to the “device to stop young people congregating” search query which led someone to this site.) Liberty’s Shami Chakrabarti - while I don’t always agree with everything she says - puts it very concisely:

What type of society uses a low-level sonic weapon on its children?
Imagine the outcry if a device was introduced that caused blanket discomfort to people of one race or gender, rather than to our kids.

The Mosquito has no place in a country that values its children and seeks to instill them with dignity and respect.

Incidentally, the 15 kHz, 17.5 kHz and 20 kHz wave files which I put on this site a couple of years ago before coming across the Mosquito-inspired Teen Buzz ringtone still bring more search engine traffic than any other article (the mobile phone moisture-detection stickers are a close second). If you’re interested in testing your hearing, the Free Mosquito Ringtones site has since done a better job with a wide range of frequencies.

Top image from Compound Security’s website; Buzz Off logo from Children’s Commissioner press release [Word document].

I’m pleased to say that I’ll be presenting a short paper, Design With Intent: Persuasive Technology in a Wider Context* at Persuasive 2008, the 3rd International Conference on Persuasive Technology, taking place from June 4th-6th in Oulu, Finland.

The paper’s a (very) brief introductory review of some of the different approaches to ‘Design with Intent‘ from various disciplines, many of which have been discussed to some extent on this website, with an attempt to relate them to persuasive technology, the field started by Stanford’s B J Fogg and his team and now rapidly developing worldwide at the intersection of interaction design and behaviour change. (The paper doesn’t get as far as the DwI Method on which I’m currently working and hoping to test in the next few months.)

This is my first stab at a conference paper, and I’m incredibly excited (and lucky) to have had it accepted; there are a lot of very helpful comments and suggested revisions from the reviewers which I will endeavour to incorporate. I’m not sure what the conference organisers’ position is on making the paper available here; certainly authors from previous Persuasive conferences have put papers on their own websites after the conference, so I expect I will do the same. The proceedings will be available as part of Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.

Many thanks to everyone who’s helped with my research via this site, suggesting angles to investigate and helping to clarify my thinking in this area, and to my PhD supervisors at Brunel, Professors David Harrison and Neville Stanton, for their help and support.

*Lockton, D., Harrison, D.J., Stanton, N.A. ‘Design With Intent: Persuasive Technology in a Wider Context’.

Abstract: Persuasive technology can be considered part of a wider field of ‘Design with Intent’ (DwI) – design intended to result in certain user behaviour. This paper gives a very brief review of approaches to DwI from different disciplines, and looks at how persuasive technology sits within this space.

UPDATE (21 April): Following the precedent of some other Persuasive authors, I’ve uploaded a preprint version of the paper here: Design With Intent: Persuasive Technology in a Wider Context [PDF, 169kb]. As required to be stated, this is a self-archived preprint version of the paper, to be presented at Persuasive 2008, June 4-6, Oulu, Finland, and published in H. Oinas-Kukkonen et al. (Eds.): PERSUASIVE 2008, LNCS 5033, pp. 274 – 278, 2008.
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008

Update: Also known as Useful Landmines in the 43 Folders world - thanks Pantufla!

Mistake-proofing - poka-yoke - can be as simple as encouraging/forcing yourself to do things in a sequence, to avoid forgetting or avoiding intermediate steps. If you’re the sort of person who hangs a jacket or bag on the door handle, so it can’t be forgotten on the way out, puts things in front of the door so you can’t forget them when you’re going out, or at the top or bottom of the stairs so you’ll remember to carry them to their intended destination next time you’re using the stairs, you’re engaged in mistake-proofing. You’re introducing a behaviour-shaping constraint to assist your own effectiveness.

In the above photo, putting the mobile phone (on-charge) inside a shoe makes it more likely that it will be remembered when going out: the act of putting the shoes on requires the user to pick up the phone, which could otherwise be easily forgotten. Similarly, Mark Hurst (of Good Experience and ‘Broken’ fame) regularly features two very simple poka-yoke procedures in his Uncle Mark’s Gift Guide & Almanac:

How to remember if the batteries aren’t in your camera

Summary: If the batteries are dead, or aren’t in the camera, keep the battery compartment open.

Description: When you’re charging your camera batteries (in a wall charger, say), keep the camera’s battery compartment open. That way, if you pick up your camera to put it in your pocket or purse, you’ll see that the battery compartment is open and will remember that the batteries aren’t in it.

There’s also this:

How to make sure they see the papers you dropped off

Summary: Put the papers on their chair.

Description: Here’s a tip I learned years ago and have used ever since. If you want to make sure that someone sees the papers you dropped off at their desk, put the papers on their chair. The natural inclination is to drop the files on the keyboard, or beside the mousepad. What’s the first thing the person does when they get back to their desk? They shove the papers aside, onto a nearby pile. They want to check their e-mail immediately, and those papers are in the way!

But put the papers on their chair, and watch what happens: the person refuses to sit on them! They take a second to pick them up, and while they’re in-hand, the person takes a look at the files while they get comfortable in the chair. Bingo: you guarantee attention to your drop-off.

Of course the papers-on-chair method can also be used to remind (or discipline) yourself about dealing with important papers.

This kind of very simple sequencing poka-yoke comes almost naturally in our everyday lives, at least with certain tasks. Sometimes it’s simply reminding ourselves to do something (e.g. putting a Post-It note somewhere we can see it); other times it’s trying to prevent us proceeding until some action has been taken (e.g. putting a Post-It note right in the middle of the computer screen so we can’t ignore it). Donald Norman’s Things That Make Us Smart has some interesting discussion of the power of Post-It notes and their importance as “information in the world”, disburdening some of our mental load - also part of the whole Getting Things Done phenomenon.

Sometimes we even (consciously or otherwise) try to ‘trick’ ourselves into behaving how we want to (or know we should) - the random offset alarm clock (patent; Halfbakery discussion) and Gauri Nanda’s “runaway success” Clocky being examples that spring to mind. (I once had a bedside clock radio where the button to set the minutes no longer worked, which meant that I could only set it either on-the-hour, or, because I forgot to do it at the right moment, set it maybe between 5 and 30 minutes fast. That meant that there was an uncertainty built into every time I glanced at the display, and indeed every time the alarm went off. I was rarely late, as a result.)

I have a hunch that almost trivially simple sequencing poka-yokes (in particular) could be important in designing for sustainable behaviour, such as reducing energy use and waste generation. For example, if your rubbish bin had a recycling box built into the top, so that you had to lift it out of the way (hinged, perhaps, to make it hassle to remove entirely) before putting anything into the main bin, it would be difficult to ignore the recycling box. Hence, learning as much as possible about different methods people use to mistake-proof themselves, or shape their own everyday behaviour, is likely to be useful in exapnding this line of research.

So, what are the everyday home-spun (or otherwise) tricks you use to help mistake-proof yourself?

Simon Sellars, proprietor of the endlessly fascinating Ballardian, has organised a ‘Festival of Home Movies’, inviting mobile phone videos on the ‘Ballardian’ theme, including but not limited to “dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes & the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments”:

In 1984 J.G. Ballard called for a ‘Festival of Home Movies’ and 24 years on we’re happy to oblige: announcing our latest competition, to promote JGB’s forthcoming autobiography, Miracles of Life.
…
Closing date for submissions: February 20.
…
Selected entries will be hosted on the site and the winner will receive a copy of Miracles of Life along with the forthcoming HarperCollins reissues of Ballard’s Millennium People, The Drought, The Crystal World, The Drowned World and The Unlimited Dream Company.

I’ve been reading Miracles of Life over the last few days, though not in a strictly chronological order (rather, like The Atrocity Exhbition, opening it, finding a paragraph that catches the eye, and continuing in that way). It’s quite poignant, given JGB’s current illness, but somehow very inspiring.

Mac as a giant dongle

At Coding Horror, Jeff Atwood makes an interesting point about Apple’s lock-in business model:

It’s almost first party only– about as close as you can get to a console platform and still call yourself a computer… when you buy a new Mac, you’re buying a giant hardware dongle that allows you to run OS X software.
…
There’s nothing harder to copy than an entire MacBook. When the dongle — or, if you prefer, the “Apple Mac” — is present, OS X and Apple software runs. It’s a remarkably pretty, well-designed machine, to be sure. But let’s not kid ourselves: it’s also one hell of a dongle.

If the above sounds disapproving in tone, perhaps it is. There’s something distasteful to me about dongles, no matter how cool they may be.

Of course, as with other dongles, there are plenty of people who’ve got round the Mac hardware ‘dongle’ requirement. Is it true to say (à la John Gilmore) that technical people interpret lock-ins (/other constraints) as damage and route around them?

Social status-based DRM

The BBC has a story about the Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive, a digital photo archive developed by/for the Warumungu community in Australia’s Northern Territory. Because of cultural constraints, social status, gender and community background have been used to determine whether or not users can search for and view certain images:

It asks every person who logs in for their name, age, sex and standing within their community. This information then restricts what they can search for in the archive, offering a new take on DRM.
…
For example, men cannot view women’s rituals, and people from one community cannot view material from another without first seeking permission. Meanwhile images of the deceased cannot be viewed by their families.

It’s not completely clear whether it’s intended to help users perform self-censorship (i.e. they ‘know’ they ’shouldn’t’ look at certain images, and the restrictions are helping them achieve that) or whether it’s intended to stop users seeing things they ’shouldn’t', even if they want to. I think it’s probably the former, since there’s nothing to stop someone putting in false details (but that does assume that the idea of putting in false details would be obvious to someone not experienced with computer login procedures; it may not).

While from my western point of view, this kind of social status-based discrimination DRM seems complete anathema - an entirely arbitrary restriction on knowledge dissemination - I can see that it offers something aside from our common understanding of censorship, and if that’s ‘appropriate’ in this context, then I guess it’s up to them. It’s certainly interesting.

Neverthless, imagining for a moment that there were a Warumungu community living in the EU, would DRM (or any other kind of access restriction) based on a) gender or b) social status not be illegal under European Human Rights legislation?

Disabling buttons

From Clientcopia:

Client: We don’t want the visitor to leave our site. Please leave the navigation buttons, but remove the links so that they don’t go anywhere if you click them.

It’s funny because the suggestion is such a crude way of implementing it, but it’s not actually that unlikely - a 2005 patent by Brian Shuster details a “program [that] interacts with the browser software to modify or control one or more of the browser functions, such that the user computer is further directed to a predesignated site or page… instead of accessing the site or page typically associated with the selected browser function” - and we’ve looked before at websites deliberately designed to break in certain browers and disabling right-click menus for arbitrary purposes.

A public bench has been removed from outside West Hampstead Library [photo from Pashmin@'s Flickr] after it became a magnet for street drinkers.
The Town Hall now plan to use “perch” benches in the area in a bid to cut anti-social behaviour.
…
Singer-songwriter David Thompson, 52, of Sumatra Road, has penned a song called Menches on Benches, celebrating the camaraderie among users of public benches. He said: “A lot of people who are down and out or just high on drugs sit there at night which might be the reason they took them away, but it’s a weak society that sees removing them as the solution. You have a fellowship on the bench.”

Norma Sedler, who lives in Hillfield Road, added: “Just because a few druggies and winos started ­sitting on the seats the KGB come along and take away our lovely seats with proper backs and slats and all we have left is to sit on the pavement. When I was a kid there were always old people watching the world go by. Now I’m old myself, it’s nice if you’re going on an errand to sit down on a bench.”

Is it not the council’s action which is the anti-social behaviour here?

Rolling bench

On completely the other side of the coin, this (via) - thanks to Ray Stone for telling me about it - seems a clever piece of design which actually benefits the user: the bench surface can be rotated after it’s rained, so that a user need not sit on a wet surface. Some of the comments at YankoDesign do suggest that the underside could actually get wetter due to water running down the surface and not evaporating in the sunlight; this might be a valid concern.

Interesting, though, how quickly it was before someone commented “How long would it take before somebody rolled a homeless guy off the bench?”

Bench design by Sungwoo Park, Yoonha Paick, Jongdeuk Son, Banseok Yoon, Eunbi Cho & Minjung Sim.

Security is about preventing adverse consequences from the intentional and unwarranted actions of others. What this definition basically means is that we want people to behave in a certain way… and security is a way of ensuring that they do so.

Bruce Schneier, Beyond Fear

A simpler way of thinking about Interaction Designers is that they are the shapers of behavior. Interaction Designers… all attempt to understand and shape human behavior. This is the purpose of the profession: to change the way people behave.

Jon Kolko, Thoughts on Interaction Design

(Italic emphases are original; bold emphases are mine)

It’s interesting to see such similar language used in two fields which are rarely seen as related. But they are, of course: they are about human interaction with technology. To some extent, security - certainly the design of countermeasures - may be a rigorous, analytical subset of interaction design, just as interaction design is a subset of the intersection of technology and psychology. Designers in one field ought to be able to learn usefully from those in others.

Interaction design is not commonly defined as Jon Kolko does above - it was reading that specific quote on his website which persuaded me to buy his book - but it’s pretty close to the idea of design with intent.

This is a communal rubbish chute serving a block of flats. The cross-sectional area of the aperture revealed by opening the hatch should be smaller than the cross-sectional area of the chute itself, so there’s less chance of rubbish bags getting stuck, even when someone crams one in.

That aperture dimension is important. It (to a large extent) determines the volume of rubbish that can be thrown away in one go. That in turn determines the size of the bins that users of this chute will (probably) have in their houses or flats, and thus how often the bin will have to be emptied. Taking the rubbish out can be a chore; halving the bin size doubles the number of trips to the chute, doubles the inconvenience.

It is, therefore, more desirable not to throw too much away. At the very least, having a smaller bin will make users aware more often of just how much waste they’re generating.

But does that have any measurable effect on purchasing decisions in the first place, assuming that more minimally packaged products are available as an alternative to those with excess packaging? How strongly coupled are the (limited) affordance of a smaller bin, and, at a couple of removes, in-store decisions? Is that rubbish bin, or indeed the chute aperture itself a social actor, a messenger, capable of persuading people to change their behaviour purely by existing with one set of dimensions rather than another?

Effectively, do people with smaller rubbish bins in their houses consciously buy items with less packaging?

Where else is this modified affordance -> inconvenience -> behaviour change pattern used as a strategy? As with making parking spaces deliberately smaller to make owning a large vehicle less convenient, the strategy may have some potential.

Now, this is not in the same league, but interesting nonetheless: a ‘game’ to teach children (4 years onwards) spelling using a poka-yoke technique. The Spellmaster, from J W Spear & Sons - the example here is from 1980 (the Enfield factory was closed after a Mattel takeover in 1994) featured eighty plastic letter tiles, Scrabble-like but larger, with raised pegs underneath, a different pattern for each letter.

The letter tiles are used to spell the names of objects and concepts (colours, numbers) illustrated on punched cards which fit onto a backing board, the tiles only fitting in their spaces correctly if the pegs pattern aligns perfectly with the punched holes. If the wrong letter is used, the tile doesn’t fit properly and sits at an angle rather than snapping neatly into place. The ’snap’ of a correctly positioned letter is actually pretty satisfying - surprisingly so, given the combination of plastic (urea formaldehyde, I think) and 30-year old cardboard.

Left: The wrong tile - the pegs do not align with the punched holes. Right: The correct tile - everything lines up. Below: The wrong tile here - note the extra peg on the left-hand edge of the tile, which doesn’t match up with the punched hole, and leads to the tile not sitting down properly.

Letters which could work either way up, such as ‘o’ and ’s’ have - as would be hoped - symmetrical peg patterns. It’s a simple system, but it’s clever and while not offering any ‘remedial’ function to the child, I would think it’s not too likely that many children would try all 25 other letters assuming the first one didn’t fit. Hence, there is some bias against pure trial-and-error. It’s interesting to think how immediately we might consider a computer-based solution to this kind of design brief today, where a purely physical one would work very well and give a different kind of tactile satisfaction.

Over at the brilliant Ballardian, editor Simon Sellars has just published my article ‘J.G. Ballard & Architectures of Control‘, where I take a brief look at how Ballard’s work repeatedly examines ‘the effect of architecture on the individual’ - something central to both the physical and psychological aspects of my research. Many thanks are due to Simon for giving me the opportunity to write for this (very knowledgeable) audience, and I hope I’ve done the subject justice.

Surveillance cameras hung like gargoyles from the cornices, following me as I approached the barbican and identified myself to the guard at the reception desk… High above me, fluted columns carried the pitched roofs, an attempt at a vernacular architecture that failed to disguise this executive-class prison. Taking their cue from Eden-Olympia and Antibes-les-Pins, the totalitarian systems of the future would be subservient and ingratiating, but the locks would be just as strong.

Super-Cannes, chapter 15.