Rulebooks for Life

Today I was delighted to introduce game designer and critic Tracy Fullerton, as part of the seminar series at the Center for Computer Games and Virtual Worlds. Fullerton is an Associate Professor at USC's Interactive Media Division in the cinema school, but I first got to know her as one of the members of the feminist game collective Ludica.

She began her talk by discussing the role of the experimental avant-garde in the history of film to criticize Roger Ebert's dismissal of videogames as a meaningful genre of cultural production and rebut his declaration that "Video games can never be art." Rather than pay attention to Ebert's headline-grabbing negations, Fullerton urged her audience to attend to John Sharpe's more nuanced exploration of the potential virtues of videogames. Nonetheless, she admitted that videogames were far from a mature medium. She compared them to "gangly teenagers" who were growing unevenly and who were "held back by their own success."

Fullerton also made a point of differentiating "experimental or exploratory games" from "art games" that have recently been receiving critical attention. She also raised questions about the auteur model of game design that characterizes the work of Jason Rohrer, Jonathan Blow, and others who fit "our myth of the artist" as solo producer.

However, even collaborative approaches could go wrong, according to Fullerton, if not oriented around processes that allow time for reflection. She discussed the "game jam" mode of production, which could be wildly creative although it allowed "less time to think and less time for thoughtfulness." In contrast, she talked about the long schedules of corporate "waterfall" modes of top-down hierarchical production and how even the more dynamic "scrum" forms of mass market organization might only be "flexible" rather than reflective.

She then explained her own thoughts about the "meandering march" that might be experienced by the player navigating the experimental videogame The Night Journey and by her team of game designers as they learned to collaborate with famed video artist Bill Viola. She cited this article by William Judson about Viola's "pursuit of enlightenment through attention to transcendent experience" to explain the basic concept of a game about revelatory experiences and reflection in which players are supposed to move more slowly rather than more quickly. She explained how the "player had to enact a journey of their own" as darkness is falling in the game world.

Initially, Viola had planned to include a number of spiritual text that he had found inspirational and Fullerton was stumped by the initial plan to "read books in the game." Although they tried a number of approaches from illuminated manuscripts to word mazes to concrete poetry, the presence of the letters to be decoded seemed to detract from the game. So then they prototyped a version with a voice-over reading instead, but eventually they deleted the voice-over, which Fullerton said had functioned "like scaffolding or a mold" in the project. Unlike the usual "document, execute, polish" sequence, the results were more unpredictable but also more satisfying.

She also described her work developing Walden, a game about Henry David Thoreau's famous "experiment in self-reliant living." Unlike most games with reward "acquiring more," Fullerton wanted a game that rewarded balance. She also thought that the text was relatively easy to adapt, unlike most literary works, because Thoreau spelled out the rules himself. There were four basic needs: food, fuel, shelter, and clothing (a list that Fullerton granted many might find arguable). And then some additional quality of life items to be included: solitude, sound, reading, and visitors. Thus the game becomes about the challenge in negotiating between sustaining life and seeking inspiration. Of course, this work is still an adaptation, and Fullerton's team still had to decide what not to include. So they left out tidbits like the fact that Thoreau brought his laundry home to his mother. It is interesting to note that Fullerton described a similar issue about whether or not to include text in the game as the one she struggled with in The Night Journey. For more about Walden, see the video above, which Fullerton describes as a "tone piece," not a representation of game play and this posting about Fullerton's talk by Jana Remy.


During the question-and-answer session, the audience learned more about Fullerton's interest in "the relationship between action and outcomes," we learned more about the fascinating game Pathfinder, which her USC team has been developing to encourage students who may be the first ones in their families to go to college to learn how to "game the system" and understand "college admissions as a game." Because the point system is transparent, Fullerton hopes to help students learn about time management and fiscal planning in a way that has cards for "killer breakup" (can't earn as many points) and "robotics club" (a points bonanza).

Fullerton also talked about her confession at the recent GDC that she feared that she might be becoming a worse game designer as a result of working on so many educational games, where state standards for topics like "transcendentalism" or "botany" might interfere with the enjoyability of play.

Check back to the Center's website for video of Fullerton's talk. Footage of the Nick Montfort / Ian Bogost talk is now posted here, which I also introduced, although I did so barely coherently in a week during which I was constantly running around from place to place for the DAC conference. Hopefully the lighting will also be better for the Fullerton talk.

BP Means Bungled Publicity

Who wouldn't love this satirical send-up that imagines British Petroleum's use of Twitter at "A crash course in PR from the folks at @BPGlobalPR."

Here are some sample examples of advice about breaking bad news:

1. Acknowledge the problem without acknowledging specifics. This was our very first tweet:

@BPGlobalPR: We regretfully admit that something has happened off of the Gulf Coast. More to come.

2. Be open about one piece of bad news and no more. You want to appear human, but you don't want to appear like a bunch of idiots. There's another word I'd use there, but I don't think I can. It rhymes with mickleticks.

@BPGlobalPR: Sadly we can no longer certify our oil as Dolphin Safe.

Thanks to Meena Kadri for the link!

The official webpage for the Deepwater Horizon Response attempts to bring together institutional stakeholders from corporate and government sectors involved in the giant response to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Given the amount of negative publicity that the story of the environmental disaster has generated, attempts to use social network sites like Facebook and Flickr seem oddly out of touch with rhetorical realities.

At the same time that grim images showing the dire effects of oil washing ashore on wildlife have been reaching the front pages, the Flickr page for the official response presents a much more positive set of messages.

Into the Gulf

The Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Map allows users to add YouTube videos of the unfolding disaster or Twitter postings describing the scene to a map with environmental information. It's an interesting example of digital rhetoric that combines GIS with social media data to personalize the consequences of the spill.

Degrees of Separation

This video from Virtualpolitik friend Bernhard Drax uses the virtual world, which has its own virtual economy, Second Life, looks at the multiple ironies involved in another system of virtual economies: the cap and trade system. As Espen Aarseth has already pointed out, capitalism inevitably relies on virtual economies of many kinds, beginning with the contemporary currency system, so this form of abstraction isn't necessarily all that new. Check out how the video also uses information graphics, 3-D simulations, and a number of corporate tools to question corporate influence in the cap and trade system.

Correction: I overlooked sending kudos to VP pals Nonny de la Peña and Peggy Weil for their roles in the project.

A Force More Powerful

In the wake of the powerful earthquake that has rocked Chile, a nation known for Internet savvy government policies and a population fond of social network sites, it may not be surprising to the development of the simple Google-powered "Person Finder" widget, which can be easily embedded in the sites of others. Unlike similar websites developed after the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, this site uses a minimalist aesthetic of a largely white-space frame. Google admits, however, that the site could also be used by commercial spammers and other bad actors: "All data entered will be available to the public and viewable and usable by anyone. Google does not review or verify the accuracy of this data."

In the wake of the disaster many turned to the NOAA Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, which is laden with graphic content and maps, tabs, and risk diagrams.

In Hot Water

Jeremy Douglass of the Critical Code Studies working group is offering an interesting series of readings of the computer code related to climate models that demonstrate global warming at work in the so-called "Climategate" scandal involving leaked e-mail messages exchanged among scientists, which I have written about here before.



This tutorial from Michael Suede supposedly on reading comments in code encourages climate skeptics to hit pause on their online video players in order to carefully peruse the evidence that the speaker presents. Because programming is often a collaborative activity, it is suprising to see that the author of these comments used so much profanity and personal attitude in his expressions in the genre. In the classes on programming that I've taken, NPOV is emphasized in composing comments or a winking friendliness to the next programmer who might tackle a tricky section that might seem somewhat opaque.

However, as Douglass points out, not all would agree with Suede's reading or another reading of the code as dubious by the BBC. The following videos present a much more generous reading of the code practices involved in developing the software used by climate scientists, which -- according to Douglass -- "argues for a different interpretation of the 'climategate' source code based on a critique of interpretive rhetoric (e.g. ad hominem interpretation), an appeal to understanding of the culture of personality among software engineers, and the contextually specific meaning of the word 'integrity' and what it signifies in the context of 'data integrity' about the software and data."





This shows the productivity of this start-up group, which leader Mark Marino notes already has 97 members, 15 code critiques, over 80 bibliographic entries: 80+ entries, and 67 comments generated in response to the first week's presentation.

Taking Virtual Candy from a Baby

There are many things that I might disagree about with economist Edward Castronova, but his argument that virtual economies at work in games merit study is certainly legitimate. As Castronova and others have pointed out, understanding virtual economies is particularly important as our own economic systems become independent of any substrate of material production and as virtual goods and ethereal substances like attention and membership and trust get assigned dollar values.

Pollution would seem to be something that could function with a commodity market model, since particulates can be measured and tracked as a definite negative good, but the market of carbon credits that might attempt to regulate them functions like other markets with a number of imaginary quantities in play.

Now Wired describes how hackers have broken into online carbon credit databases to steal carbon credits worth real money. The German news station Deutsche Welle describes how "Hackers steal emissions trading certificates" as well. Apparently, it operated as a relatively straightforward phishing venture:

According to the Financial Times Deutschland, the fraudsters sent e-mails to companies in several European countries, as well as in Japan and New Zealand.

They used the official DEHSt logo, and urged the companies in the mails to register again as a hacker attack was allegedly imminent.

The hackers were thus able to gain access to company accounts and transferred their emission certificates to accounts registered in Denmark and Great Britain.

From there they sold the CO2 emission permits on the free market for a thus far undisclosed sum of money.

One medium-sized company in Germany, for instance, reportedly lost permits worth 1.5 million euros ($2.1million).

Meltdown

The social advertising blog Osocio reports that Canada has shut down parody websites created by the anti-globalization and corporatization activists The Yes Men, which claim to announce the Canadian government's commitment to reducing greenhouse gasses. What I find interesting is to see the long disclaimer at enviro-canada.ca and ec-gc.ca from the service provider who was obviously complying with the government's directive under duress:

Serverloft blocked the IP-range for this server because of the content of the client's website and would only unblock the IP-range if we suspended the website. The website was used in a spoof by The Yes Men.

Serverloft blocked the IP-range without a warrant and without calling us and thus affecting servers hosting 4500 of our customers' websites until we ourselves discovered the problem, and convinced Serverloft to unblock. Serverloft did send us an email explaining that they would not unblock the IP-range until the websites were taken offline. The email was sent 5 minutes after they cut of the access to the mail server, so we only received the email after the 4500 websites were back online.

Convincing Serverloft that their systems had blocked access on purpose was hard because Serverloft frontline support claimed that all their systems were working fine and they therefore assumed that the problem was a configuration problem on our server. They refused to help troubleshooting the issue.

Serverloft could simply have called us and asked us to deal with the situation. We would then have asked the Canadians for a warrant. If the Canadians had shown us a warrant we would have taken down the site immediately. As others have pointed out the Canadians could probably just have gone through CIRA and have the domain suspended, which would not have affected any of the other 4500 websites.

This is much more than a simple 404 message and even includes a timeline of the controversy with background information and an excerpt of the e-mail that the company received from their hosting service, which claims that a phishing incident was the cause for the suspension. It also emphasizes a rhetorical stance of accommodation and rationality in the conflict.

The Tragedy of the Commons

Looking at the website for the Copenhagen climate summit, I am struck by the fact that the online institutional rhetoric reflects the incoherence of objectives and agendas that may have ultimately doomed the efforts to gain serious limits on the production of greenhouse gasses. The United Nations Climate Change Conference website contains many of the aspects one would normally expect of a conference, such as information about the venue, meeting times, registration, accommodations, and conference logistics. But it also incorporated blogs and newsfeeds that indicated the dissatisfaction of protesters and participants with the proceedings.

The Rifled Faculty Mailbox

A recent New York Times article, "Hacked E-Mail Is New Fodder for Climate Dispute," details how the electronic mail exchanged on scientific mailing lists has become evidence to those who are global warming deniers. Hackers snatched almost two hundred megabytes of e-mail from the British Climatic Research Unit, which is suddenly receiving more traffic from the general public for open electronically published material on its servers as well. They attempted to upload the data to RealClimate.org, which published the following statement in response that provides an interesting commentary about digital rhetoric.

As many of you will be aware, a large number of emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia webmail server were hacked recently (Despite some confusion generated by Anthony Watts, this has absolutely nothing to do with the Hadley Centre which is a completely separate institution). As people are also no doubt aware the breaking into of computers and releasing private information is illegal, and regardless of how they were obtained, posting private correspondence without permission is unethical. We therefore aren’t going to post any of the emails here. We were made aware of the existence of this archive last Tuesday morning when the hackers attempted to upload it to RealClimate, and we notified CRU of their possible security breach later that day.

Nonetheless, these emails (a presumably careful selection of (possibly edited?) correspondence dating back to 1996 and as recently as Nov 12) are being widely circulated, and therefore require some comment. Some of them involve people here (and the archive includes the first RealClimate email we ever sent out to colleagues) and include discussions we’ve had with the CRU folk on topics related to the surface temperature record and some paleo-related issues, mainly to ensure that posting were accurate.

Since emails are normally intended to be private, people writing them are, shall we say, somewhat freer in expressing themselves than they would in a public statement. For instance, we are sure it comes as no shock to know that many scientists do not hold Steve McIntyre in high regard. Nor that a large group of them thought that the Soon and Baliunas (2003), Douglass et al (2008) or McClean et al (2009) papers were not very good (to say the least) and should not have been published. These sentiments have been made abundantly clear in the literature (though possibly less bluntly).

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.

Instead, there is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking.

It’s obvious that the noise-generating components of the blogosphere will generate a lot of noise about this. but it’s important to remember that science doesn’t work because people are polite at all times. Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice person. QED isn’t powerful because Feynman was respectful of other people around him. Science works because different groups go about trying to find the best approximations of the truth, and are generally very competitive about that. That the same scientists can still all agree on the wording of an IPCC chapter for instance is thus even more remarkable.

It is interesting to analyze how these assertions operate and the implications they contain: that old-school listservs are better suited to scientific debates than blogs, that there exist private spheres as well as public ones, and that the Internet fosters conspiracy theories rather than a recognition of dissensus.

From the perspective of what my colleague Mark Marino calls "Critical Code Studies," perhaps the ClimateAudit attempt at reading lines of code is perhaps most interesting and their assumption that a simple comment annotation serves as the "smoking gun" rather than more sophisticated black box algorithms.

Solar Flair

Victoria Vesna points out an interesting example of data visualization from the Land Art Generator Initiative in which the map of the world is redrawn to show the square mileage required for solar collectors to meet the world's current energy needs. There is also a site-specific aspect to the project in the United Arab Emirates.

The UAE Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI) is a landmark initiative to bring together artists, architects, scientists, and engineers in a first of its kind collaboration. The goal of the Land Art Generator Initiative is to design and construct a series of land art installations across the UAE that uniquely combine aesthetic intrigue with clean energy generation. The LAGI viewing platforms will be tourist destinations that draw people from around the world to experience the beauty of the collaborative art creations here in the United Arab Emirates. At the same time, the art itself will continuously distribute clean energy into the electrical grid with each land art sculpture having the potential to provide power to up to 50,000 homes in the UAE.

Oxymoron.gov

Ren Reynolds points out irony of creating an online game that urges children to go play outside rather than stay inside interacting with their computers. Neighborhood Explorers was created by the Fish and Wildlife Service. However, several of the examples involve urban wildlife close to home such as hawks, deer, and owls, and the site provides tips about spotting their habitats. However, it looks like whoever designed this website somehow didn't get the memo about the problem of unintentionally creating a "creepy treehouse." Furthermore, the skill-and-drill quizzes don't feel much like a genuine game and so this opportunity to create an interesting playable simulation about the environment is lost.

Anchors Aweigh

David Weinberger and I have both argued that official government blogs should express the voices of particular public servants as individuals and highlight the rhetorical diversity of individual government spokespersons. Unfortunately, encouraging an escape from standard PR monotony can sometimes have unpredictable results. Take the title of a recent posting on the White House blog, "Ahoy Matey," as an example of what not to do, since it may represent too folksy a tack for public rhetoric.

Earth Eclipse

As the Obama administration creates dozens of new .gov domains that are divorced from the operations of specific government agencies with physical addresses, designated personnel, and plans for sustainability, it can be useful to think about .gov domains that are no longer maintained, despite similar fanfare at their launch. For example, Vice President Al Gore once hailed the future value of the geographical resources for citizens at DigitalEarth.gov, which in the age of Google Earth have long ago been supplanted. Nonetheless, those in the mood for e-government nostalgia can check out Gore's 1998 speech about the initiative, and the evolution of the site from 2000 to 2006 on the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive.

(Thanks to Alex Tarr for the link!)

A Dish Served Cold

In "Shell to Pay $15.5 Million to Settle Nigerian Case," the New York Times reports that the heirs of writer and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa will be receiving compensation from the Dutch petroleum giant that recognizes the environmental losses of the Ogoni people caused by drilling and the execution of Saro-Wiwa by the Nigerian government at the time.

The news story has a personal resonance for me as well. Over a decade ago, I wrote "'Dis Nigeria Sef': Ken Saro-Wiwa as the Poet who Wasn't" for an issue of Sulfur edited by Marjorie Perloff. According to my c.v., it is the first scholarly article that I ever published. It chronicled Saro-Wiwa's role as a defender of composition in Standard Written English and the debates of Anglophone authors with those who championed writing in regional native languages, such as Ngugi wa Thiong'o. It also detailed aspects of the Internet campaigns aimed to free Saro-Wiwa, which were ultimately unsuccessful.

One Flu Over the Cuckoos Nest

Okay, who can resist a game about clinical virology and killer flu? As Ian Bogost explains at Water Cooler Games, the game presents two related arguments: 1) "pandemic flus are rare and unusual strains that are far harder to spread than popular discourse might make it seem" and 2) ordinary seasonal flu kills hundreds of thousands worldwide every year. Like many serious games, such as Operation Pedopriest or the ReDistricting Game, players play from the position of the bad actor by trying to infect likely carriers with mobility and connections to concentrated populations who work, live, or study together best suited to spread the disease. By making the game particularly hard to play in H1N1 mode, because infection is dependent on genetic compatibility, the game design itself reinforces the pedagogical message. Unlike public health games like Outbreak at Watersedge that rely on the online tutorial format, game play exploits the excitement of racing the clock.

Treed

Props to the husband of Virtualpolitik friend Jessica Marshall, Peter Belhumeur of Columbia University, who is working on a mobile application that identifies tree species based on the shape of their leaves. According to "Digital Field Guides Eliminate the Guesswork," the group has developed a prototype for the iPhone that eliminates page flipping and human trial and error. In the future, this device may be "used one day not only by backyard botanists, hikers and children on field trips, but also by scientists and volunteers to compile data for environmental inventories, or as part of species discovery."

Leave No Trace

It might be called the "movie popcorn problem." How can you persuade people to change their attitude about the environment, when their own contributions to waste that fouls a given area have become unconscious and unwitnessed by others. Just as noone cleans up their own trash in their own seat at a movie theater, because mechanisms against littering aren't in place, so too are people reluctant to take responsibility for their own contributions to landfills, atmospheric emissions, and energy drains.

At Persuasive 2009, there were a number of technological applications designed to change this pattern of behavior. Games such as EcoIsland use the metaphor of the sinking island to conserve, a mode of persuasion that is most powerful when there are others watching. Unlike the rapidly emerging crises that often cause resources to be quickly marshaled, of the kind specialized in by groups like ISCRAM, Jorge L. Zapico pointed out that all too often risk communication is stymied by a slow crisis, auxh as global warming. Zapico proposed that persuasive technologists should be doing more to use mobile phones, pervasive sensors, and social media that are changing communicaiton patters and how we work to intervene in the global crisis. Some forms of personal tracking can actually encourage anti-social behavior, such as Dopplr's "Personal Velocity" feature. After all, who wants to be a duck like the speaker when you can be a lizard like his girlfriend?

Yet social networking allows the possibility of self-monitoring, social comparison, social facilitation, and reduction that emphasizes lack of effort. As Zapico argued, the tragedy of the commons could be broken using social media, even if reducing one's carbon footprint meant not traveling to conferences. Websites like 43 things can encourage environmental goal-setting. Carbon Calc even presents an iPhone application that allows mobile users to see the aggregation of their actions, and the we:offset feature on Nokia phones allows users to pay their carbon offset on the spot. In Canada One Million Acts of Green encourages user-generated content about sustainable living, with the aim of making the normal green rather than the green normal. Principles include social facilitation, reciprocity, social comparison, normative influence, and social learning. As Zampico said, why not consider "the ramifications of easiness in a complicated system."

Lenses of Contact

As someone generally interested in raising awareness of "architectures of control," I've been a big fan of Dan Lockton's Design with Intent blog for a while, because it draws attention to how our experiences of consumerism and urbanism involve interactions with designed systems that reinforce particular kinds of rules. Today, at the Persuasive 2009 conference, Lockton presented part of his Design with Intent Toolkit, which outlined six possible "lenses" through which to see the design process. Given this toolkit, Lockton's work is also obviously relevant to my own interest in government persuasion around the four trends that I followed in the Virtualpolitik book: public diplomacy, social marketing, risk communication, and institutional branding, as political institutions move away from print-based media and toward computational media platforms.

Lockton began his talk with a series of behavioral contradictions that compromise energy efficiency as consumers buy energy-efficient light bulbs but leave them on all night, never explore other settings on their washers, leave water running while brushing teeth, and -- in his own country -- indulge in unnecessary overfilling of teakettles that if not wasted would provide almost enough energy to power all the street lights across the UK.

In looking at the level of "simple interaction with an everyday product," Lockton suggested a number of obvious conundrums, such as "What level do I work at?" in relation to the interface or "Whose side am I on?" in relation to ethical boundaries. As he put it, "Is it still user-centered design if we are trying to change behavior rather than accommodate it?"

To try to visualize these questions, Lockton provided three diagrams that represented 1) motivating behavior, 2) enabling behavior, and 3) constraining behavior. As an example of the motivational category of persuasion, he pointed out the presence of the EcoButton in the attendees' conference swag bags and briefly explained how the gadget worked. He also cited a number of influences on his work. For example, in explaining the role of "reduction" and "tunneling," he payed homage to B.J. Fogg, who was sitting in the second row, and he also praised the aesthetic of simplicity epitomized by John Maeda. He also displayed a number of quotations that emphasized the larger philosophical dimensions in these kinds of design activities. He noted the continuing influence of Buckminster Fuller as well, particularly in regard to making modifications in the environment to "get man moving in the right direction." (Fuller was also an important figure in Fred Turner's talk at U.C. Irvine last week.) In acknowledging influences on his thinking, Lockton wasn't afraid to air some of the potentially disturbing aspects of persuasive technologies that might actually remove options for users, which runs contrary to the principles of those like Heinz von Foerster who only want to maximize liberty through invention. As he pointed out, hypertext pioneer Ted Nelson once cynically defined technology as something that somebody wants someone to submit to, and Cory Doctorow similarly noted that no customer woke up this morning wishing to do less with his or her property. He also gave a plug for the book Nudge and the work of Richard Thayler.

Lockton then quickly reviewed the six lenses that constitute each "worldview on behavior change." They include the Persuasive lens, which includes "self-monitoring" and "kairos," the
Cognitive lens that addresses heuristics, structures of bias, and constructs of self-interest, which includes "social proof" and "framing," the Errorproofing lens, which includes "defaults" and "interlock," the Architectural lens, which includes "positioning" and "layouts," the Visual lens, which includes "prominence" and "metaphors," and finally the Security lens that less ethically seems to use components to coerce, which includes "surveillance" and "atmospherics." However, he pointed out that using classical music to drive away younger users was in practice not much different from using the smell of fresh-baked bread to draw customers in. Furthermore, in response to the constraints of the errorproofing approach, he asserted that when it came to nuclear safety or preventing medical error, few would advocate for the user's liberty.

For Lockton, these categories were often mixed, so that the same design choice could be read through multiple lenses. For example, Amazon's feature that informs users of what others who bought the same product also bought served both "social proof" and "kairos."

He then ran through a series of designed scenarios from a sign over a lightswitch reading "your bonus depends on this" to a two-color switch that seems visibly disorded when switched on. He even described a system created by a designer from the University of Chicago that dimmed lights as appliances and lights were turned on to raise awareness about excessive energy use.