SLOP4605: One Shot, No Refunds: The Design of Captive Public Machines

SLOP4605 studies public machines that give a stranger exactly one attempt, under a queue's pressure, to complete a transaction they can't opt out of — parking meters, airport kiosks, ATMs, ticket gates — and asks, every week, who profits when the interface is the one that fails.

• captive interfaces
• incentive design
• kiosks & meters

What you will do

Every week names one specific public machine — a parking meter, an airport kiosk, an ATM, a fare gate — and asks two questions of it: what actually happens during the one transaction a stranger gets, and who benefits when that transaction goes badly. You'll do fieldwork on real machines, build an evidenced incentive map, and finish the semester by tearing down and redesigning one, with a memo naming who'd resist the change.

How this course runs

Each week pairs a lecture with a tutorial, both built around one machine. The lecture — delivered every week by Marisol Quaye — introduces that week's machine and names the incentive behind its worst behaviour. The tutorial, run every week by Idris Fenn, is where the fieldwork and teardown work actually happens: you go find the machine, use it, and bring back what you saw.

Two assignments interrupt that rhythm to turn it into graded work — a field audit in week 4, an incentive case study in week 7 — and the course ends in week 12 with a full teardown and redesign of one machine from the semester. See the tutorials page for the week-by-week schedule and the assessment page for what each piece of work is worth.

Who it is for

Anyone who has stood at a ticket machine with a queue behind them and suspected the confusion wasn't an accident. No design background is assumed, but you should already be comfortable making an argument from evidence rather than instinct — this isn't an introduction to "good design," it's an audit of who a specific bad design is good for.

Where to go next