Natasha Dauchol is an expert on the gambling industry. Her book, Addiction By Design, reveals how slot machines keep gamblers in a suspended state of play that's devastating to their finances and their well-being. She says casino designers could hardly explain the human vulnerabilities they were exploiting. The formula that gets hit upon, you don't have to understand it, she says: "It rises to the surface"
In part two of our interview with cultural anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll, author of Addiction by Design, we learn what gamblers are really after a lot of the time — it’s not money. And it’s the same thing we’re looking for when we mindlessly open up Facebook or Twitter. How can we design products so that we’re not taking advantage of these universal urges and vulnerabilities but using them to help us? Tristan, Aza and Natasha explore ways we could shift our thinking about making and using technology.