Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

by Andrew Hinton

William J. Mitchell explains in City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn (MIT Press):

Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life

“Software is being embedded in material objects, imbuing them with an awareness of their environment, and the calculative capacities to conduct their own work in the world with only intermittent human oversight.”[

At the center of all this disruption is how we understand basic elements of our environment: What place am I in? What objects does it contain, and how do they work? Who am I, and who can see me, and what I am doing? What used to be clear is now less so.

“Context” is not the setting itself, but the engagement with it as well as the bias that setting gives to the interactions that occur within it. “Environment” is the sum of all present contexts.[12

Paul Dourish, in his seminal paper on context and human-computer interaction, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Context,” argues for a model in which, “Context isn’t something that describes a setting; it’s something that people do....It is an emergent feature of the interaction, determined in the moment and in the doing. In other words, context and...activity...cannot be separated. Context...arises from and is sustained by the activity itself.”[

Does it do a good job of informing? If it does, it’s “good information.” If not, it’s “bad information.”

The best way to untangle the many knotted strands that create and shape context is to understand how the world makes sense to us in the first place — with bodies, surfaces, and objects — and build the rest of our understanding from that foundation.

THE PRODUCTS AND SERVICES WE DESIGN ARE PART OF A GREATER ENVIRONMENT, but they have the capacity to change that environment as well as the behaviors of people who use them.

It explores what affordance really is, with special attention to how it was originally conceived by its creator, James J. Gibson.

In the Universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between there are doors. — WILLIAM BLAKE

The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception:

For him, “To perceive is to be aware of the surfaces of the environment and of oneself in it.”[

which include examples such as activity theory, situated action theory, and distributed cognition theory.[

Affordances are properties of environmental structures that provide opportunities for action to complementary organisms.[

Affordances exist on their own in the environment, but they are partly defined by their relationship with a particular species’ physical capabilities.

These environmental and bodily structures fit together because the contours of the latter evolved within the shaping mold of the former.

We should instead ask: is this structure’s affordance more or less conventional or learnable — keeping in mind that “learnable” is often dependent upon how the affordance builds on established convention.