In my design and thinking around online communities, I am constantly entrenched and talking to other designers about abuse risk and mitigation. Any product or service which presents opportunity for public reward also opens itself to a number of pitfalls, including gaming the system, abusing the system, abusing other people that use the system, and so on.
Some recent examples I can think of are:
The Flickr Flashr
A guy was going around Flickr introducing himself to women on Flickr, telling them how much he enjoyed their photos, and that they should also come check out his photos. When the unsuspecting women would arrive at his photostream, BLAMMO: they got flashed!
The Yahoo Answers gamer
I was talking to Randy Farmer about Yahoo Answers, and he mentioned something about a guy from Nova Scotia who, early on with Answers, gamed the system so that he would by far be the person with the highest score on the leader board. I believe he did something like write a little app that would troll questions, scrape them for keywords, conduct an internet search looking for said keywords, and provide answers that were maybe close enough to being right so that he would get even more points. I can’t remember the exact scenario, but it was something ridiculous like that. And what was his motivation? Nothing other than being acknowledged in a high-traffic public space on the web.
Anyway, the list goes on and on. The more involved I become with online communities, and more importantly designing online communities, the more I think about mitigating the risk of lowlifes abusing things. Which finally brings me around to the point of this post:
An Italian Interaction Designer has designed what she calls Electric Cinderella. As Gizmag points out:
The Electric Cinderella shoes idea began as part of Simona Brusa Pasque’s thesis at the Interaction Design Institute in 2002 and was inspired by a beautiful woman who Simona interviewed for her thesis who wanted to be able to “intimidate her intimidators.” She wanted to be empowered without losing her femininity, to have the freedom to be sexy without fear. The shoes certainly achieve that, offering 100,000 volts of high fashion stun gun power which can be activated by a control on the matching necklace.
Now maybe it’s just me, but doesn’t this sound like a recipe for disaster? How does a designer 1) justify creating such a product beyond it being a joke and 2) mitigate the risk of someone abusing (or maybe killing) the recipient of the product’s intended use? Or are Italian men that aggressive?
I guess on the one hand designing that sort of product is much more exciting - especially the usability testing part of the process… On the other hand, I don’t believe I would want to put myself into a situation where the fruits of my labor could also land me in a courtroom, which, we all know is where everything that is any fun ends up these days. Oh, and be sure to check out the photos, which bare an uncanny resemblance to something from the Austin Powers series.