Less is More: Lessons from Traffic Intersections Without Signs

Tom McNichol, in Wired Magazine for December, 2004, wrote an insightful and revealing article about carefully designed traffic intersections that do away with warning signs, stop lights, and the like, in favor of safe confusion. I'll let you read the article for yourself, but what a fecund concept! The basic ideas run something like this; remove the things that make people feel sure of themselves, and they will act with more caution; and use design, rather than explicit rules, to
enforce compliance. Examples from the article include, narrowing residential streets to slow traffic, removing center stripes on roads to reduce driver speed and increase caution, and making intersections more ambiguous to increase driver caution. I was skeptical at first, but the
article details the success of these techniques.

This gets the gears between my ears churning and turning. Where else can we use design to minimize rules and maximize proper behavior. Where else can we take things away to increase their effectiveness?

One example came immediately to mind. I can't recall where I read this, but an author had suggested that instead of asking video rental customers to "Be kind, rewind." that they instead be encouraged NOT to rewind. Cheating becomes impossible! If you choose to rewind you are
giving the next renter an unexpected bonus, but otherwise, every renter has to rewind their own tapes.

Anyone have suggestions or examples of their own?