Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

by Andrew Hinton

This systemic point of view is important in a broader sense of how we look at context and the products we design and build. Breaking things down into their component parts is a necessary approach to understanding complex systems and getting collaborative work done. But we have a tendency (or even a cognitive bias) toward forgetting the big picture of where the components came from. A specific part of a system might work fine and come through testing with flying colors, but it might fail once placed into the full context of the environment.