Designing Safe Living, Architectures Of Control And Wine Economics (Link List)

Virtually everyone knows that the way a large grocery store is laid out is a careful exercise in design. All the fresh veggies as you come in the entrance and all those free sample carts at the end of the aisle are designed to get you to buy more -- and more expensive -- items.

Using design principles to manipulate people in predictable ways is not particularly new but I happened to run across a trio of very interesting posts on this idea that seemed worth sharing.

The first is from the American Association of Wine Economists (where do I sign up?) titled, They Always Buy The Ten Cent Wine (via Marginal Revolution). Apparently the way wines are organized on a shelf is designed to make sure you see the expensive, special occasion wines.

The second is not so much a post but a blog called Architectures Of Control. Besides having a very cool blog name (is it a blog or a thrash metal band?), the author, Dan Lockton, is a PHD researcher in Industrial Design at Brunel University (which also has one of the few intel studies programs in Europe) in the UK. The evolution in Dan's thinking about how to use architecture to control people, for good and bad purposes, is fascinating to watch. He is a keen observer of this niche and is always worth reading.

Finally (and I read this on AOC), there is actually a conference on using design to improve security: New Science s Of Protection--Designing Safe Living in Lancaster, UK from 10-12 July, 2008.

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The Serious Play Series

Final Thoughts: A Challenge To Designers (Serious Play)

I knew it would take me a few days to both recover from jet-lag and to synthesize all the ideas that both came to me (and were thrust upon me) at the Serious Play Conference last week. It was a fascinating examination of seriousness, play and design (in all its forms) and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in seeing what the world looks like (or might look like) outside their usual box.

As much as I enjoyed being in the midst of the intellectual fireworks, I couldn't help but think that the kind of design solutions the intelligence community needs were not in the mix. Most of the designs I saw actively drew attention to the product, they helped sell it in some way or helped the product or film or project make its point from a particular point of view. I suppose the designers would tell me that such a reaction is inevitable, that good design draws one in and bad design repulses and that there is no neutral ground.

Still, intelligence products, in my estimation, need something different than what I saw. I was reminded (really!) of Lao Tse's comment on good leadership: The best kind of leader is one who, when the job is done, the people say, "We did it ourselves!" Likewise, the best kind of design for intelligence products is, in my estimation, the kind of design that, when the product is viewed by a decisionmaker, the decisionmaker does not notice that it is there yet it helps analysts communicate their findings.

Form matters. Anyone who has tried to decipher a single spaced block of 8 point text knows that some elements of design are essential no matter what the product. At the other end of the spectrum, form doesn't trump content. While this is probably true of all things, it is certainly true in intelligence work.

Herein, then, lies the challenge to designers: How should the intelligence profession design its products? What kinds of design solutions best meet the needs of the modern intelligence professional? How would intelligence change if the kind of creative firepower I saw at the conference were brought to bear upon it? Would we be able to communicate the results of our analysis better or would it just be "different"? I don't know the answer to these questions but I think it would fascinating to find out.

(Note: This was a different kind of conference for me and I suspect for most of the regular readers of this blog. If you are interested in my other observations (and have not seen them already), I have listed them below in chronological order)

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