JONTILLMAN.COM | Part of the problem since 1976

Dan Lockton writes about “architectures of control“:

Increasingly, many products are being designed with features that intentionally restrict the way the user can behave, or enforce certain modes of behaviour. The same intentions are also evident in the design of many systems and environments.

I personally find the list of products he has talked about to be a fantastic list of “unnecessary things”. It seems almost an admission of the uselessness and unnecessary nature of a product for it to have to have an architecture of control built into it (e.g. DRM to protect intellectual “property rights”).

Perhaps one of the defining characteristics of unnecessary things is that their makers strive to imbue them with the ability to create dependence, or at least create a need or desire to consume more, or perhaps a requirement to consume more in order to own/operate the object in question.