SIGIA-L Mail Archives: Immoral IA (was Re: SIGIA-L: Throwing mu
Immoral IA (was Re: SIGIA-L: Throwing mud: cartographic representation of site structure
From: christina wodtke (cwodtke_at_eleganthack.com)
Date: Wed Aug 22 2001 - 20:00:58 EDT
> Also, I've been to many department stores in my life and I can't think of
two
> that treat layout in the same way. In fact, the physical layout of a store
is
> often treated non-intuitively on purpose by space designers looking to
invoke
> particular reactions from customers, not the other way around.
Jesse James Garrett once told me about this-- malls are designed to
disorient people, because psychologically speaking, disoriented people will
often buy something to regain a sense of power. I would call this immoral
architecture-- architecture used to hinder, to confuse, to trick...
This article
http://www.alumni.uchicago.edu/magazine/0108/features/index.htm
included
--"Our problem," summarized a senator from Wisconsin, "is not too much
cheese produced, but rather too little cheese consumed." One component of
the post-war effort to peddle more cheddar was to shift research away from
how much consumers could be expected to eat toward what made them hungry-and
how to make them hungrier-a field that was dubbed motivation research.--
In a society in which we buy things we don't need only to throw them in
dumpsters after they cease to amuse, and grow overweight tantalized by
juicily dripping carl's junior commercials are we as user-centered IA's
helping or hindering? Do we even have a choice, as we fight to keep our
jobs?
I think of hidden clauses in service agreements cleverly set a click away
where the user is less likely to follow through, or amazon's famous
one-click buy that results in purchases that have not been thought
through....
just wondering, just pondering...
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2
: Sun Nov 23 2003 - 22:54:48 EST
|
