Understanding Context

by Andrew Hinton

  These tacitly inhabited maps are culturally bound information structures that we erect and reinforce through the narratives we share and the ways in which we communicate and behave. In some ways, these culturally determined semantic realities are even more important than the conventional maps we make, because the first sort sets the terms under which the second sort are created and understood. Culture creates invariant structures that determine how we understand our experience, and the interface for that cultural map is language—the very sort of information that makes the map in the first place.

  Maps are not neutral information artifacts. Because they cannot contain every detail of the world, they can accommodate only certain, chosen aspects of our environment, our culture, and our own lives. As Rothstein’s article on cartography explains, “maps are not just a progressive record of attempts to know the world; they are a record of attempts to construct and control it. Maps are not innocent. They select the data they wish to emphasize and ignore what is inconvenient. They are...instruments of power.”[313]

  Author and cartographer Denis Wood argues in The Power of Maps (The Guilford Press):

  The selection of a map projection is always to choose among competing interests; that is to embody those interests in the map...even if we confine ourselves to such superficially technical issues as the representation of angles and areas, distances and directions.[314]

  Everything we make is full of decisions driven by someone’s interests somewhere, whether we’re conscious of it nor not. And maps are especially charged with political, social, and personal significance.

  We have a great responsibility when creating information environments: even though contextual meaning ultimately depends on the perceiver, the environment has a lot of control over the perceiver’s experience of that reality. Information architectures create maps we live in, and those maps reify choices, values, and agendas. They have always been a way for one party to define the world in categories that suit that party’s own interests. What makes a place for humans has as much to do with these factors as what the physical affordances of a place provide.

  Organizational Maps

  Structure is always political because it always potentially implies something about how people are organized in relation to one another. Places are made of many things, not just the ecological surfaces of the physical environment. As anyone who has worked in a modern corporation can attest, there are many structures at work in business beyond the walls, ceilings, and floors of an office building.

  In Figure 16-4, we see what some say is the first corporate organizational chart ever made—the diagram describing the structure of the New York and Erie Railroad in the mid-nineteenth century.[315] Railroads were a new species of human organization that required real-time coordination across vast distances and time zones. To function, railroads required semantic artifacts such as these as much as they required tracks and switches or headquarters buildings in major cities. To a large degree, the railroad lived in the system described by this chart.

  Although it’s common for the physical layout of an office structure to reflect the hierarchy of its inhabitants—big, corner offices for senior executives, smaller internal offices for middle management, open seas of cubicles for the rank-and-file—physical layout alone isn’t enough for the complexities of large-scale business.

  As David Weinberger explains in Everything is Miscellaneous: “Each company has one official org chart because the flow of authority needs to be simple and unambiguous for legal reasons, not just to create an efficient decision structure.”[316] The environment—in this case the byzantine semantic architecture of legal regulatory rules—exerts controlling pressures on the shape of the corporate body, requiring it to make its own semantic structures to “couple” with those legal pressures.

  Weinberger goes on to explain how this facet of information for the company describes only one official, enforced slice of the actual structures at work there. The rest tend to be more tacitly emergent: the networks of shared expertise, friendships, trusted partnerships, and other sorts of social connections.

  Business uses semantic structures in other ways besides organizational command. For example, a company can recategorize workers from “employees” to “independent contractors” to avoid taxes and benefits costs—often with just a few clicks in a database.[317] Moving people semantically from one state of being to another can have a devastatingly real effect on those lives.

  Figure 16-4. Organizational diagram of the New York and Erie Railroad, circa 1855

  The organizational chart is just one example of how language creates structures that we inhabit. As humans, there’s no escaping the places we make with information, whether we mean to make them or not. In information architecture practice, it’s crucial to understand not only the official organizational structure, but the unofficial, tacit, cultural power structures, as well, both for the client or employer and the social structures that the organization serves—families, towns, and even other companies.

  * * *

  [302] Rothstein, Edward. “Map Makers Explore The Contours Of Power; New Study Tries to Break the Eurocentric Mold.” New York Times; May 29, 1999 (http://nyti.ms/1sL4yZ7).

  [303] Resmini, Andrea, and Luca Rosati. Pervasive Information Architecture: Designing Cross-Channel User Experiences. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann, 2011:55.

  [304] ———. Pervasive Information Architecture: Designing Cross-Channel User Experiences. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann, 2011:68

  [305] ———. Pervasive Information Architecture: Designing Cross-Channel User Experiences. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann, 2011:69

  [306] Referenced earlier, in Chapter 9.

  [307] via Bing.com, annotations by author.

  [308] http://www.buckhead.net/history/buckhead/index.html

  [309] Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thebigchicken.jpg

  [310] London: J. Edwards, Pall Mall & G. Robinson, Paternoster Row, May 1st, 1798 (http://www.loc.gov/item/2003627084).

  [311] Cresswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004:9.

  [312] Frake, Charles O. “Plying Frames Can Be Dangerous: Some Reflections on Methodology in Cognitive Anthropology” Quarterly Newsletter of the Institute for Comparative Human Development, 1977;(3):6–7.

  [313] Rothstein, Edward. “Map Makers Explore The Contours Of Power; New Study Tries to Break the Eurocentric Mold.” New York Times; May 29, 1999.

  [314] Wood, Denis. The Power of Maps, 1st edition. New York: The Guilford Press, 1992:57. (emphasis in original)

  [315] The First Org Chart Ever Made Is a Masterpiece of Data Design Liz Stinson March 18 2014 Wired.com (http://wrd.cm/1t9Cnoe).

  [316] Weinberger, David. Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. New York: Times Books, 2007:182.

  [317] Wood, Marjorie Elizabeth. “Victims of Misclassification,” New York Times, December 15, 2013.

  Chapter 17. Virtual and Ambient Places

  It’s funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen.

  —ALEX, IN A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, ANTHONY BURGESS

  Of Dungeons and Quakes

  SEMANTIC INFORMATION CAN BE TRULY IMMERSIVE. Whether it’s an all-night dorm conversation or losing yourself in an engrossing novel, language can swallow our attention whole. When you add more layers to the semantic environment, meaningful experiences of place can emerge. Take a role-playing game such as Dungeons & Dragons (Figure 17-1). For the players, the physical surroundings—a friend’s kitchen table or the back of a hobby shop—recede into mist as the shared story of the campaign becomes more palpable and compelling. Even as a teenager, when I was an active player, I marveled at how all it took was some scribbling on paper, some rules, and some dice to create a fully engaging environment that my friends and I could inhabit until dawn.

  Digital technology is turning the sorts of rules and maps we find in a table
top game into actively inhabited virtual places as well as radically transformed physical ones. We find one example in text-based Multi-User Dungeons (or Domains), more commonly known by their acronym “MUDs” (and variants MUSH, MOO, and so on). Invented almost as soon as computers with command-line interfaces could be networked, MUDs establish immersive environments in which players can interact as they find treasure and slay monsters, or in some cases just socialize and build new places and objects.

  Figure 17-1. A game of Dungeons & Dragons, in progress[318]

  In one such “social” MUD, called LambdaMOO (MOO standing for “MUD, Object Oriented”), writer Julian Dibbell witnessed the power of that immersive experience himself and wrote about it in his 1999 book, My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World (Henry Holt and Company). At one point, he tried creating a map to help him fully comprehend the MOO, but found that it couldn’t fully encompass all the wonders that had been created by LambdaMOO’s denizens. He had an epiphany: “It occurred to me that there was in fact one map that represented the width, breadth, and depth of the MOO with absolute and unapologetic reliability—and that map was the MOO itself.”[319]

  LambdaMOO and other similar MUDs have a built-in scripting language that players use to create new parts of the environment; and the environment itself is often referred to as the game’s map. The MOO has nested structures, all described strictly with written language, including the rules that govern the environment’s programming. A typed command can create an object; when an entryway is added—an attribute that creates the ability to enter the object—it becomes a room. Rooms can be connected, and filled with other objects, which can be programmed to interact with players.

  LambdaMOO in particular has a central gathering place—the Living Room, shown in Figure 17-2—where a loquacious cockatoo “object” is programmed to respond to actions such as being bathed, fed, or even gagged when it becomes too noisy. The player is represented as an avatar, which is essentially another object in the environment. The object-oriented approach to the environment works like a digitally reified, more strictly hierarchical version of James J. Gibson’s elements: objects, places, layouts, and the rest.

  Figure 17-2. The Coat Closet and Living Room in LambdaMOO

  In his LambdaMOO adventures, Dibbell found that the MOO, populated mainly by grad-school academics and computer scientists, was an emotionally significant place for its users, where they were exploring sides of their identity and social life that might have been impossible otherwise. In a storyline that threads throughout the book, Dibbell shows how the brutal violation of an in-game character by one or more hackers (going by the name “Mr. Bungle”) had an unsettling effect on the user whose in-game avatar was harmed. She was more surprised than anyone that the experience felt so traumatic that it brought her to tears; and the administrators who ran the MOO found themselves conducting a sort of Constitutional Congress to figure out how the MOO should be governed.[320] Reading the account now, one has to be struck by the questions the MOO leaders wrestled with, because they still sound so familiar and relevant for all our shared online environments, from intranets to social media platforms. The “cyber-bullying” and cruel “trolling” that have become epidemic in recent years all have early, awful seeds in the actions of Mr. Bungle.

  Text-based MUDs and their ilk are still around and still have immersive power. But technology soon advanced to the point at which three-dimensional visual game spaces went mainstream. In the mid-to-late 1990s, I was obsessed with Quake, a genre-defining first-person-shooter video game. In particular, I was interested in the multiplayer variant that allowed players to compete in real time, in various versions of the game rules, from “Deathmatch” to “Capture the Flag.” At the time, it was cutting-edge technology. The studio that created Quake, id Software, invented techniques for game design, decentralized networking, open APIs, 3D rendering, latency handling, and countless other infrastructure innovations that we take for granted today, and which are in use far outside game software.[321] It was also one of the first games to inspire a massive online community outside of the actual game itself.

  I’ll admit that I wasn’t a very good player. I ended up spending more of my time setting up and “modding” game servers, and designing websites for teams (Quake “Clans”), complete with real-time scoreboards and sprawling, threaded discussions. Some of these experiences are what formed my own foundational ideas about what it means to make information environments.

  Quake’s action takes place in game levels referred to as “maps,” of which you can see a later-version example in Figure 17-3. The open approach employed by id Software made it possible for creative people all over the Internet to create their own maps and game variants, some of which became much more popular than the ones that shipped with the game.

  Figure 17-3. A Quake “map” as it looks as a wireframe view in a map editor

  In the words of one pair of players I chatted with back then, while they were running practice sprints from flag to flag on a particularly challenging map, “We live here!” It was a self-deprecating jest about the amount of time they were spending perfecting their game, but it struck me then—and still does—as a fundamentally true statement. Whether it’s the literally architectural simulation of a Quake map (see Figure 17-4), the word-based simulation of LambdaMOO, or the more subtly place-making qualities of a website or instant messenger platform, our lives meaningfully “take place” in these environments.

  Figure 17-4. How one room of a Quake map looks as rendered in the game (map designed by Tom Boeckx for Quake 3 Arena, a more recent version of the game)[322]

  The Porous Nature of Cyberplaces

  Every retail website, social network, email platform, corporate intranet and smartphone app establishes structure that we come to understand as places—because that’s how all terrestrial creatures self-organize their understanding of the environment. Even if we resist calling them cyberspace, they are certainly cyberplaces; and there are more of them than ever. Each one is its own more-or-less contained contextual experience within the vast array of nested contexts in the environment. Although they seem to be contained within the screens of the devices we use to access them, that sense of containment is only an aspect of their interface. Most digital places are actually porous and connected.

  Behind the scenes is an ocean of unfettered digital information, potentially connecting that site, app, or platform with anything else on the Internet. Even in the late 1990s, multiplayer Quake servers were not only generating the immersive experience of the game, but were also spewing real-time scores, player names, and network information to server-browsing platforms, which were then connected to all manner of game-finding applications, websites, scoreboards, and more. That was a novel concept in the mid-1990s, but not anymore. If I use my bank’s smartphone app to transfer money from my account, my spouse can receive an immediate text message informing her about the transaction. If I post an update to Twitter, all sorts of third-party platforms can add it to their data stores or syndicate it into mash-ups.

  There are offline interconnections, as well. Whereas online environments were once seen as a virtual escape from reality, they’re now mostly a supplemental dimension we use to enhance and expand our physical, offline lives. So, digital placemaking is equally a way to close the distances of time and space between ourselves and our families, friends, and coworkers.

  Outside of game platforms, we most often see structures that use built-environment tropes as metaphors rather than simulated buildings. Google Plus uses “circles,” Facebook uses “groups,” and Basecamp uses “projects”—all of these are labels standing for structures that instantiate places, defined by how they organize our online environment.

  Figure 17-5 shows a feature in Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8 operating system called “Rooms.” The creators of the feature realized the phone could do a better job of helping users establish a sense of place for organizing their communication and tasks. In a post on the
official Windows blog, Juliette Guilbert, a member of the design team, explains:

  It definitely takes a village, but our village needs all the help it can get. Now that my husband has his new [Windows phone], we’ve got it—in the form of Rooms, a new feature in Windows Phone 8. Instead of flinging frantic texts around, we can check the room calendar to see who’s on deck. We can start a group chat so everyone’s on the “What the heck is happening?” thread together. And when I add something to the grocery list or cancel a dentist appointment, the updates sync to my husband’s phone. He’s got the room pinned to Start, so its Live Tile even alerts him to the changes.[323]

  Although designers might think of Rooms as a metaphor, it’s important to remember that users will likely take the label at face value. Because this is a relatively new feature, as of this writing, it remains to be seen just how successful it will be.

  Figure 17-5. Three panels of the Windows Phone 8 Rooms feature[324]