#Hostile design

[geekysteven]

[titleknown]

You know the curb cutters effect, where an infrastructural change designed to help disabled people helps other demographics too?

I feel like we should talk about the evil inverse of that, when a change designed to hurt a marginalized group ends up hosing everyone else too, if only to push against it.

The biggest example of this would be, of course, hostile architecture...

[marslowart]

Being seen in an AI social world

This post came to my attention today.

It’s difficult to put my feelings (and thoughts) into words right now. I know consent has been a difficult topic in the technology world for a while, and it’s no surprise the whole AI thing became so pervasive so quickly given the absurd investment these companies made in making it the trending topic of the decade and a toy accessible to anyone.

I have many questions, regarding the computational power dedicated to a tool that’s geared towards destroying creative work, a tool that fails so fundamentally in understanding the process of creating art yet claims to surpass it. I have questions regarding the energy and water costs of keeping the massive servers they certainly need, when scarcity is an ever present threat in a world that heats up more every year. I question all the dedication and investment when we have far more pressing issues of illness, hunger, inequality, and the list could go on.

I question why are we living in a world that’s incapable to control the greed and maliciousness of companies who exploit their users at every new development.

I don’t usually talk about myself a lot here, but I’m also a UX/UI designer, so I’m familiar with the process of Design Thinking, of creating a product based on the user needs…and features that hide themselves subtly to make the users fall into a trap is just hostile design. This is the world of hostile design. I don’t get respect as a user, as a creator, as a worker, as a citizen. If I did, my representatives would have the balls to stop all these policies and decisions from companies that want to leech me.

They want to chew my art, spit me out of the market and confine me to this horrible online experience.

I’m not sure what I should do at the moment. Maybe I’ll take all my art posts down from tumblr, maybe I’ll create a telegram channel later to post my art and talk to people. I have no idea which is the best route at the moment. I felt pressure to “put me out there and be seen” my whole life.

Interact with viewers.

create a fan base.

But it feels like no platform respects me enough right now, and I’m not willing to give up all of me. Opt-out is not enough.

Sorry for the long post.

[zenosanalytic]

I've been using the tumblr app a bit to link a friend posts in-text, and I just want to say that having the Log Out button RIGHT BENEATH THE DELETE ACCOUNT BUTTON is the most fucked up example of deliberately, vindictively user-unfriendly design I can think of. No WONDER ppl are constantly deleting their accounts on accident!

[holoshaii]

Honestly at this point I think trying to make america less car-dependent is just a lost cause.

Lobbying (read: legal corruption) and just straight up bribery from the car-industry seems to win way too often because the average american is so indoctrinated into car-culture that they wouldn't even see a better city design if you held them at gunpoint right in front of it. Because they gotta justify why they bought that massive pickup truck that they never use to actually haul anything more than their own fat ass.

For every stride that urbanism makes over there, 50 steps back are taken because they keep building low density suburbs with single family homes that take up 5 times as much space as they need, with no facilities near them, continuously perpetuating the same bad design everywhere they can.

It's honestly nothing but depressing how anti-human their city design is, and continues to be. And we're not even talking about hostile design yet.

[rumade]

There is enough space around this column to have 4 benches. So why only 1 🤨🤔?

[zipperkiller]

Fuck maybe later, fuck not now, if I wanted you turn on your shitty service that exists only to extract more value from me I’d seek it out

I'm fed up with "maybe later".

[albiclalepsza]

The single most infuriating thing that appeared in the last few years was the trend of setting grocery stores up in a way that makes it pretty much impossible to leave them without

a) buying something

or

b) inconveniencing the already overworked and understaffed employees

They try to frame it as a natural consequence of self checkouts but you definitely could do one without the other. Some stores do and they are doing just fine

[eydilily]

so i dont love you !

[whereserpentswalk]

Fuck hostile architecture, I want unhostile architecture. I want benches to be designed to be as easy as possible to sleep on. I want little places for pigeons to nest to be purposefully put on buildings. I want people designing public spaces to think about what they'd be like to skateboard on. I want "Please loiter" signs. I want people to be kind. I want...

[hellyeahheroes]

How The Car Industry Stole Out Streets by Adam Something

[the-real-dwn-022]

Found a thing, figured I'd share. Perfect for thosssse of you who aren't willing to get into proper vandalissssm but ssstill want to do the world a favour.

[problemnyatic]

Yeah yeah linux having problems is a big joke but honestly have you considered that linux wouldn't run like shit if it didn't have to reverse engineer byzantine proprietary drivers and hardware architecture and deliberately hostile BIOS firmware and one thousand other things that exist solely to force everything that isn't a corporate OS to suffer miserably on every computer ever

[sammusbird]

OP’s tags

Replacing physical buttons and controls with touchscreens also means removing accessibility features. Physical buttons can be textured or have Braille and can be located by touch and don't need to be pressed with a bare finger. Touchscreens usually require precise taps and hand-eye coordination for the same task.

Many point-of-sale machines now are essentially just a smartphone with a card reader attached and the interface. The control layout can change at a moment's notice and there are no physical boundaries between buttons. With a keypad-style machine, the buttons are always in the same place and can be located by touch, especially since the middle button has a raised ridge on it.

Buttons can also be located by touch without activating them, which enables a "locate then press" style of interaction which is not possible on touchscreens, where even light touches will register as presses and the buttons must be located visually rather than by touch.

When elevator or door controls are replaced by touch screens, will existing accessibility features be preserved, or will some people no longer be able to use those controls?

Who is allowed to control the physical world, and who is making that decision?

[utilitycaster]

this was a good panel and I'm glad I watched it specifically because Taliesin deservedly has a reputation for coming up with fairly philosophical concepts behind his D&D characters, but also on another level he is just like "what if there were just wretched guy with so many things wrong with them. fucked up, right?" and it nearly always slaps

[boreal-sea]

I went to NYC over Christmas break and the one thing I felt horrible about was the fact that there was nowhere for my mother, who has bad knees, to sit. Nowhere. Not a single bench. She was able to sit in the restaurant, in the theater, and on the train. Those were the only fucking seats in the whole fucking city.

I hate anti-homeless efforts. I hate the elimination of public spaces. There were millions of people walking around NYC that week and not a single one of them was able to sit.