Context Design (beta2) World IA Day 2013

CONTEXT DESIGN
INFORMATION as ARCHITECTURE (beta)

World IA Day | Ann Arbor | 2013
Andrew Hinton | @inkblurt

What do we mean by “Information
Environment”??


(This is another iteration of a talk about a topic I’ve been writing a book about (for O’Reilly
Media). More information available at http://inkblurt.com/contextbook )

About 10 years ago when our community started the IA Institute, one of the questions we had
to tackle was - what is IA? It’s been a long conversation ever since.
The more concrete, tactical part of the deﬁnition (about art/science of org/labeling websites,
etc) was helpful for making IA sound relevant to business concerns back in 2002, and it is
still part of the picture. But it tended to be used instead of the other one (that used to be
listed second) -- the structural design of shared information environments. But what do we
mean by that phrase? It sounded right at the time, but we still don’t have anything really
undergirding that phrase.

Labels
Card Sorting
Mental Models Navigation
Methods
Facets
Tools Controlled Affinity Diagrams
Taxonomies Hyperlinks
Processes Vocabularies

Thesaurus
Task Analysis Hierarchies
Ontologies Context Models

What’s underneath
that makes these things work (or not)?


We have a lot of methods, but not a lot of understanding about why or how they actually
work. Kind of like antidepressants.
We also tend to talk about a lot of things like “understanding” and “information” and whatnot
-- but what do we mean by those things? We need more rigor, more science - I don’t mean
information science but science about humans.


Curated, complex information environment.
Physical objects, digital interfaces, lots of language and labels around. All connected together
to form a whole experience.
This is a highly controlled version of the world we now live in -- which is more emergent,
messier, but even more pervasively connected & digitally enabled.

Reality hacking.

Context

“Fountain” | Marcel Duchamp ~ 1917


Recognize this?
>> This was named by art experts as the most inﬂuential work of art of the 20th century.
Not because of its beauty, but because it signaled & partly catalyzed a rift in how we think
about culture. Duchamp and friends grabbed a urinal and signed it with a fake artist’s name,
and entered it in an art show. It didn’t get in -- but then they publicized the “injustice” of
being rejected so widely it became famous, and started conversations about what the nature
of art really is. Who decides it?
>> And it was all done by adding a bit of language to an object. By changing its context.
>> It’s a sort of reality hacking. Why?
I’ve been convinced for years now that the central problem set for information architecture is
the understanding and shaping of context.


Context has been in the air lately. Just about a year ago, John Seely Brown tweeted this about
context. I grabbed a screenshot because it’s precisely the thought that had been bugging me
for many years: that we aren’t only designing *for* context, we’re creating it.


Here’s the coiner of the word “cyberspace” quipping on context as well.

Information changes how we experience the
flickr - uicdigital

physical.

Information (in the sense we tend to mean it colloquially) is what creates and changes much
of what we consider to be contextual reality.
Look at this photo -- there’s information everywhere in this scene.
>>The lines on the road tell us where to drive; the traffic light is a virtual barrier that affects
our behavior; the road signs give us a layer of instruction that adds meaning to the city
around us. without the information here, it would quite literally be a different place.
Really, you could have civilization without cars, lightposts and buildings, but you couldn’t
have it without language. Language is our reality in many ways. And a city is as much a
construct made of language - speech as well as labels, signs, other semantic artifacts - as
one made of atoms.

Digital systems control more of our semantic life.


Here’s another city intersection - this one in Dublin. Now the signs aren’t static. Whereas
we’ve lived with signs/labels that were always persistently part of the surfaces they were on,
now the surface and the semantic meaning aren’t always persistently tied. Context shifts with
the twinkle of an LED.

flickr - aokkone

More pervasive; more immersive.

Now look at today.
When you’re using a GPS, where are you driving?
Your brain merges the information from the device with what you’re seeing in the windshield.
They become essentially the same.
So now we’re in even richer information environments.

http://www.notorietyinc.com/blog/volkswagen-x-mit-a-i-d-a-holographic-dashboard-gps-navigator-video

More pervasive; more immersive.

In fact, research is happening now to actually increase the detail & realism the information
dimension for drivers.

Information makes places,
kind of like this picture makes a pipe.

If you could smoke the pipe.

This is the famous Magritte painting -- it says “this is not a pipe”
The picture deﬁnitely shows a pipe but it’s not a real pipe you can smoke.
>>Information is kind of like this in the way it makes places.
>>Except for a key difference that, with
Information, you can smoke the pipe.

photo: http://cjsd.blogspot.com/2008/03/day-d20-
died.html

Recognize this? It’s a home-made dungeon for Dungeons & Dragons.
This is an information environment -- but it’s only barely part of the physical world. It’s all
just information. But we experienced it as feeling very real, with real consequences and
meaning with our peers.
Ok whatever -- that’s D&D. Can’t take that seriously right?

US Constitution

Some immersive
information
frameworks
aren’t physical at
all.
archives.gov


What about this?
How is this all that different from a D&D ruleset?
Some people got together and wrote an information artifact, just words on pages, but it’s the
framework the United States has existed within for over 2 centuries.
Information is real, and it creates contexts that can have powerful effects on the reality we
live in.

We co-inhabit digital publics legislated by
engineers.

“Beacon” “Buzz”

Which is why people get so upset when some of the places they live in suddenly change their
rules. Without representation, without explanation.
What did these two platforms get so wrong?
They assumed that, just because the environments they created were digital -- informational
-- the rules of physical social context didn’t apply. They oversimpliﬁed or ignored some very
complex things about how people really live.
They treated these designs as software engineering solutions, rather than life solutions.

It’s very hard to make context clear in digital places.


Careful not to have another Buzz debacle, Google has to go to great lengths to explain
Google plus. But it’s very hard to do. The environment becomes so beleaguered with labels
and narrative that the user has to learn a linguistic construct as well as the more “physical”
structures represented in the graphical interface.

vs

flickrcom - shimonkey flickr.com - anirudhkoul

Obvious difference.


For example, in physical space, there’s an obvious difference between a little nook in the corner of a room where you can
whisper to someone, and a stage in front of thousands of people where a microphone will announce what you say to all of them.

Whisper image CC http://ﬂickr.com/photos/shimonkey/447924817/
Crowd image CC http://ﬂickr.com/photos/anirudhkoul/2046282436/
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

D vs @

flickrcom - shimonkey flickr.com - anirudhkoul

Not so obvious.


But on Twitter, all it takes is D vs @ to make that difference. It changes from requiring a big, physical
change to a tiny alphanumeric slip.
The information environments we’re creating are littered with these dangerously thin barriers between
contexts.
Whisper image CC http://ﬂickr.com/photos/shimonkey/447924817/
Crowd image CC http://ﬂickr.com/photos/anirudhkoul/2046282436/
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

We’ve always lived in language.

abcdefghijklmn
opqrstuvwxyz
abcdefghijklmn
opqrstuvwxyz Map = Territory

Now we live in software -- language made into machinery.

photo: http://cjsd.blogspot.com/2008/03/day-d20-died.html

We’ve always lived in language -- since the earliest beginnings of civilization, it’s been part
of what makes us people.
>> But now we also live in software, which is language made into architecture. Places we
inhabit.
>> The map has become the territory.
So, in a weird way, the D&D geeks won ... we all live in their dungeons now.

Existing Context

online room

The Context we design.


We aren’t just designing for existing contexts anymore.
We are designing the context itself.
And the more that information dimension pervades our physical space ...

What we make for the “screen” changes the world “outside the
screen.”

Existing Context

online
room

The Context we design.


The more we’re actually designing all human context.
>>What we make for the screen changes the world outside the screen.

Actually, we’re turning the world into the “screen.”


Actually, we’re turning the world into the screen.

We don’t fully understand
what we have wrought.


I don’t think we really understand what we have made. We keep going as if everything we do
with this technology just has to be great, but we end up making mistakes and wondering how
we screwed up.

A deceptively simple model for context.

Situation

Agent Understand Subject


Situation

Agent Understand Subject


In many of the situations we’re tasked to design for, agent & subject are in the same situation
- or are the same entity.

(Did I mention “deceptively” simple?)

Situation(s)

Subject
Subject Subject
Subject
Agent/
Subject Subject Subject
Understand???
Subject
Subject
Subject


The truth is, anything could possibly be an agent or subject... it gets crazy pretty quickly. But
still, this simple model can help us look at each major entity in turn, from its perspective.
But how do we then understand what that agent is understanding?
That’s all about cognition.

Pace Layers

“Information Technology”
“Information Science”
Written / Graphical Language
Spoken Language

Perception/Cognition

Start
Here

We too often start trying to solve problems beginning with information technology -- or
when we’re being *really* insightful, we’ll start with information science.
We should begin more often with the most basic, foundational part of human experience -
perception & cognition.

Contextual Understanding involves
Perception of
& Cognition about

Information


Information in Three Modes

People communicating with people.

Semantic

Digital

Ecological 10100010
01001000
10100010
01001000
01110011 01110011

Digital systems transmitting to &
receiving from other digital
systems.

Animals (including people) perceiving the environment.


There’s a long history of people trying to deﬁne information. I’m not into deﬁning things so
much these days -- I’m more interested in describing them.
And that frees us up to understand a thing in more than one mode or dimension -- to be OK
with grasping something in all its facets. I think information affects perception and
understanding in three major modes.

Semantic

Digital

Ecological


Let’s start w/ ecological. What do I mean by that?

Mainstream Cognitive Science (not “ecological”)

Brain = Computer that works with representational
models of the world & tells body what to do.

This is still the predominant way of seeing how the brain works. It’s part of the assumptions
built into many of our methods and training.

Embodied Cognition (not yet mainstream)

So what’s ecological
here?

Embodied cognition differs ... and one strain in particular (called “radical embodied
cognition” or “the replacement hypothesis”) says we should not try to marry embodiment with
cognitivism -- but start over, replacing representationalist/cognitivist cognitive theory
entirely. That’s the camp I’ve found myself aligning with.

James J Gibson - Ecological Psychology of Perception

Long sidelined, now hailed as pioneer of embodied cognition.


JJ Gibson has emerged as a hero of the more radical camp of embodied cognitive theorists.
He started out studying WWII pilots - and found that centuries-old assumptions about how
people comprehend their environment were simply wrong. His ideas have been acknowledged
and quasi-appropriated here and there, but now many are starting to see his whole corpus of
thought more clearly -- he was really writing about embodied cognition (but calling it
ecological psychology).
The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception is an amazing read.

Information Pickup Theory

The perception-action loop.


JJ Gibson’s theory of perception involves something called information pickup theory.
He’s not talking about information in the Claude Shannon sense of information, but in a
different sense -- ecological information in the environment. Intrinsically meaningful because
of how we perceive it in our embodied cognitive experience.

A few key ideas from Gibson’s theories

Information “pick-up” is perception of
evidence of structural variation in
surfaces/substances.

We perceive the environment
in human-scale terms, not
scientiﬁc abstractions.

We perceive environment
as “nested,” not logical
hierarchy.

We perceive elements in the
environment as invariant or variant.


The concept for understanding this relationship between
perceiver and environment is...

AFFORDANCE
“... the perceived functional properties of

objects, places and events in relation to an

individual perceiver.” - JJ Gibson

Perception exists only insofar as
we perceive affordances.


JJ Gibson invented the concept of affordance. Others have since popularized it, but gotten it
somewhat wrong -- mainly because they’re coming at it from a traditional cognitive-science
perspective, not an embodied perspective.

Weather Vane & Watt Steam Governor

For both, “thinking” and “acting” are
products of their environment.


Like the wind blowing the weather vane, or the steam governor “thinking” that it should slow
down the amount of steam entering the engine -- the environment is the origin of our
perceptual systems (our bodies -- including our brains).

Sigmund


I’ve seen this with my dog, Sigmund. When I try taking him for a walk, he’ll stop as if the
ground has grabbed him. Sometimes I’ll let him explore to see what’s up, and it’s almost
always something that I didn’t perceive the way he did - either because it wasn’t relevant or
because I physically can’t perceive it. I’ve learned a lot by watching my dog ﬁgure out the
world. It’s not that different from us. He just doesn’t have the rich layer of language draped
across the world like we do.

Every use case mapped
out for an artificial
brain.

Supposedly made in
our image.

ASIMO


Can’t handle all the
possible edge cases.


Use cases not mapped out.

The architecture of the body does most
of the “thinking.”

(The “brain” mainly manages sensors.)

“Big Dog”


You can’t even kick
this thing over.


Semantic

Digital

Ecological


Language is Environment

Language is “a form of mind-transforming

cognitive scaffolding: a persisting,

though never stationary, symbolic edifice

[playing a] critical role in promoting

thought and reason”

- Andy Clark - Supersizing the Mind


Humans have created *more environment* through language. We learn its affordances from
birth onward. Some theorists have convincingly argued that language has been around long
enough for humans that it has been part of shaping our evolution over a million + years.

Contextual clarity requires structure.

“One morning I shot an
elephant in my pajamas.
How he got into my
pajamas I’ll never
know.”


Language brings structure into the world. Like the surfaces, objects, substances, etc that
Gibson describes as part of the natural environment (or the built environment) language too
comes from the same ecological reality. This joke is a joke because of the structural
components of the sentences -- the way they join together, and the way objects within them
are detached and contextually ambiguous. Language is environment, not information.
Information is what we *pick up* from the learned affordances of the language layer we add
to our surroundings.

Ecological & Semantic Information In Conflict


Don Norman famously talks about the affordances of door handles. In this case, I was walking
into a store and did not even notice the sign. This is a situation where ecological information
overrode semantic information. I was looking through the glass, into the store I wanted to
enter. Peripherally I saw a handle that invited pushing -- afforded that action.

Ecological & Semantic Information In Conflict

Which red x????

Looks like a
“confirm” action.


Similar issues can happen in interfaces. Logically speaking, the red X’s in the ﬁrst example
are all very different -- but ecologically, they require too much thought to disambiguate. In
this app I found myself always deleting rather than declining, closing rather than deleting,
etc.
In an unsubscribe interface for fab.com, my wife discovered that she was apparently re-
subscribing without realizing it, because that big red button -- like a big berry you can’t help
but pick -- contextually feels like it’s a conﬁrmation, not a cancellation/re-subscription
action.

Which of these will accidentally tweet publicly?

Very little
semantic or
ecological
information
about what
context I’m in

Ecological
Information /
Affordance for
action.


The infamous Twitter “DM Fail” problem is largely caused by users responding to DMs via
SMS.
In this case, it’s hard to tell: which of these is a Twitter app that will safely allow me to DM
someone, and which is my SMS app that will tweet to everyone who follows me? The
physicality of the interface can easily override my perception of the semantic information’s
differentiating cues.

Digital Information

Semantic

Digital

Ecological


Digital information is the sort that most serious information professionals will say is
“information.” The Claude Shannon formulation.

Digital Information

10100010 10100010
01001000 01001000
01110011 01110011

Black-box, computer-to-computer whisperings.
Not meant for direct human contact.

(But we do experience its effects in other modes.)


Digital Information Mode Leaking into Semantic Environment


We see machines around us trying to get us to perceive what they are saying, or what they
want to hear from us. We see them murmuring to each other in weird, noisy machine-only
semantics that we do not comprehend either ecologically or semantically.
The gas pump above has to have a sticker added to it that explains what “Enter Data” means.
The Twitter proﬁle with the iPhone coordinates expresses my location not in a semantic way
(the name of a city, for instance) but in a Cartesian grid that I have no contextual orientation
for, either semantically or ecologically. The Delta app has information that I, as a human, can
read, but it gives priority to the machines that I encounter in the workﬂow of the airport.

Semantic-information “place” signified by “account”

Digital architecture determining ecological & semantic context.


If I walked into a bank and asked to access an account, it’d be clear what I meant. But online,
it can mean different things (my proﬁle-account represents me in the digital context -- and
needs a label, which happens to also be “account”). The digital systems behind the scenes at
Kohls require that these two things we call “account” be separate - requiring disambiguation.
The ontology of ‘account’ is in question here. It’s one of the many sorts of things we have to
sort out with language, when we’re working in an environment that’s made of almost nothing
*but* language.


Dan Klyn and TUG came up with this diagram that explains how ontology is at the center of
what we’re doing. Strangely, when I tried ﬁnding the word “ontology” in IA texts, it’s almost
nonexistent. I’ve honestly not paid much attention to ontology for many years, but it turns
out to be one of the central things we’re overlooking when attending to how we shape
context.

ONTOLOGY

What am I? What is my world?
How do I exist in it?

Please describe a formal,
explicit speciﬁcation of a shared
conceptualization for purposes of
structuring semantic data.
00101011100100101110100101


Ontology can be the philosophical sort, or the information technology/science sort.
A big part of what IA should be doing is bridging these two planes of existence.

“Friend?”


I can’t get enough of using this slide because it points out how the mechanistic golems we
create can oversimplify what we mean with the words we use.
One of the big problems Facebook and Google have both run into is a facile conﬂation of the
word “friend” into a data entity -- when in reality, “friend” has nearly inﬁnite shades of
meaning in our lives.

What is “card” in this environment?


Lowes launched a service called MyLowes -- that requires the registration of a card. But they
also have a “Lowe’s Card” that’s a consumer credit card.
Conversations at checkout can end up like a “who’s on ﬁrst” routine -- “do you have your
Lowe’s card?” “My Lowe’s card? That’s what I’m paying with.” “No I mean your ‘my lowe’s’
card.” “This IS my lowe’s card!”

Shopping Simultaneously in a Store & the Cloud


Now that retailers are trying to be in the cloud and on the ground at the same time, context
is especially confounding. It requires a great deal of work to situate the user’s perception of
place.

Subway station + Food store


And here we have a situation where a subway station is also ﬁlled with pictures of products
that you can actually buy -- not unlike Magritte pipes that you can smoke.
With the QR code sprinkled throughout -- digital information wrapped in massive simulacra
of ecological information -- plus the semantic information of labels/brands. This could have
just been a list of words with QR codes next to them, but perhaps wisely, the retailer decided
to create the place in our image, to help bring the “reality” of shopping for groceries into
what would otherwise override perception as a subway station.

Information Architecture uses
Labels, Connections & Rules
to create the structural design
of information environments.


In essence, IA uses Labels, Connections and Rules to create structural design of information
environments.
Labels aren’t something added to the world as an afterthought -- they are the keystones of
human life. Connections between labels, places, actions -- these are the links that bring
relationships and structure to all the things we label. And the rules (something we tend to
overlook as part of IA) are the dynamic agency that can shift and change the contextual
experience we inhabit.
This is just a scratch in the surface of what it means to do information architecture, but I
hope it’s getting us a bit closer to understanding what we mean when we say “information
environment” and when we say we are creating architectures with information.

Thank You.


Context Design (beta2) World IA Day 2013

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