Understanding Context

by Andrew Hinton

  Figure 22-16. A version of the “floor plan”—which we called a “blueprint”—for a science organization, in a circa 2000 project (identifying specifics omitted)[435]

  This new approach brought a great sigh of relief to the stakeholders: they could imagine themselves moving around in those places, collaborating in common areas, and focusing on specialized communities and functions in others.

  Of course, this was a simple, almost cartoon-like, expression of structure. There was still much work to be done sorting out the navigation logic, roles, permissions, and many other issues. Nevertheless, this conceptual blueprint—composing the arrangement of defined contexts—was the model everyone needed to have a shared understanding of would be designed and built. I had no idea at the time why this worked out, but I now realize it likely has to do with how people understand nesting better than hierarchy, and how semantic information needs to establish structure but with awareness of how people need information to be environment more than discretely defined, logical abstraction.

  I’ve used a similar approach for figuring out the multiple simultaneous contexts in a particular physical place, or with a particular user over time. If we map all the contextual layers, even simply, we can begin to see them piling up. It helps us see the cognitive demands the environment is placing on the user: how many layers are expected to be attended to explicitly? How many quiet, hidden layers are making decisions the user might not know about or has forgotten about? How many are making demands, interrupting each other with no apparent awareness of the others?

  For instance, let’s examine the problem of a user’s contextual experience in her own family room. With the proliferation of new, ambient technology and mobile access, what contexts are in play that might be part of the nested environment where we might introduce a new product?

  Figure 22-17 illustrates how several elements might come together for analysis or information architecture direction, as described here:

  Overlapping shapes that roughly represent contextual layers, each identified and defined

  A scale for attention requirement, estimating between Explicit and Tacit

  A new scale for how noticeable and understandable the digital agents are, from Perceivable to Hidden

  A quick indicator showing what information modes are most in play for each contextual layer

  Such a mapping technique could give us a sense of how a person might perceive and understand the information at work in this place, which is a sort of mash-up of many places at once. The blue contextual layer, for example, is about the digital “black box” sitting in the front of the room (such as a Microsoft Kinect device), which might have a sensor range for “reading” the human agent’s bodily actions, even though the human is mostly unaware of it day to day. The other layers could be all sorts of things—thermostats, WiFi networks, and so on. And the same model could be adapted to see the world from the digital agent’s point of view, as well.

  Figure 22-17. Adapting modeling approaches for analyzing how different context layers affect a place like a home’s family room

  Usually, designers and consumers both will focus on the objects in a room like this. Yet, the objects—whether software or hardware—are only part of the picture. There’s also a contextual dynamic that’s happening between these layers of the environment and the room’s inhabitant. If we just let these layers be invisibly amorphous, we lose out on the ability to shape and improve them.

  Naming these contexts is the first step toward designing them. By naming them, we bring them out of the ether, so we can define them and come to understand them. It makes us consider explicitly what these contexts are connected to outside of the immediate perception of the user; what other systems and agents, rules and relationships? We can be explicitly mindful of how we make this environment, rather than tacitly ignore its full effects on the user’s life. As information architect Abby Covert says, “Intent is language.”[436] What do we intend these contexts to be? What is their nature?

  As we track the layers involved in any situation, and we begin seeing them pile up, we then must ask ourselves: how can we make the environment’s seams, joints, and activities more perceptible? How does it semantically represent its rules? Do those semantics provide invariant qualities in the environment, so the human agent can understand the digital influence over physical meaning? Is there just too much going on? Ultimately, we’re getting to the bottom of how agents understand the relationships between elements in their environment.

  These are idiosyncratic techniques that I’ve found useful; they’re certainly not a methodology.[437] I share them only as pointers toward new approaches. Understanding context means revisiting and questioning how we plan, model, and make. It means inventing new ways of comprehending, analyzing, and architecting in this strange, new world we’ve made for ourselves.

  * * *

  [420] Beyer, H., and K. Holtzblatt. Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 1998.

  [421] Other great resources: The Ethnographic Interview (Spradley); Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research (Goodman, Kuniavsky, Moed); Practical Ethnography: A Guide to Doing Ethnography in the Private Sector (Ladner); Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights (Portigal).

  [422] Credit where it is due: I borrowed this approach from work I once saw by user experience designer Wolf Noeding, circa 2006.

  [423] Hinton, Andrew. “Beyond Findability,” Workshop for the IA Summit, presented by the Information Architecture Institute, 2009 (http://bit.ly/1s3NBW9).

  [424] Resmini, Andrea, and Luca Rosati. Pervasive Information Architecture: Designing Cross-Channel User Experiences. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann, 2011:52.

  [425] Alexander, C. “A city is not a tree.” Architectural Form, April/May, 1965:172.

  [426] Information Anxiety, 1989, p. 48.

  [427] Drawing by author. Based loosely on concept posted at http://csetjy.blogspot.com/2012/06/classroom-layout.html.

  [428] ZMOT Handbook. Google, 2012, p. 11.

  [429] Wright, Will. “Dream Machines,” Wired Magazine, April 2006;14(04).

  [430] http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html

  [431] Thanks to Jorge Arango, an architect by training, for introducing me to bubble diagrams.

  [432] Beyer, H., and K. Holtzblatt. Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 1998:24.

  [433] Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sample_Floorplan.jpg

  [434] A version of this story was first published in UX Storytellers—Connecting the Dots; Jan Jursa (September 1, 2010) http://amzn.to/1x5rmDE.

  [435] A version of this diagram was first published in: Van Dijk, Peter Information Architecture for Designers: Structuring Websites for Business Success. Rotovision: September, 2003.

  [436] Covert How to Make Sense of Any Mess, 2014.

  [437] For readers who want more detailed tools and methods, an excellent, more exhaustive approach is available in the final chapters of Resmini and Rosati’s Pervasive Information Architecture.

  Appendix A. Coda

  So here we are, finishing with a coda. In musical terms, it’s a final passage that brings a movement to an end. It gives the audience a chance to take a breath and reflect.

  In musical scores, it has a signifier that looks like this:

  * * *

  In ethics and psychology, a well-worn thought experiment concerns something called The Trolley Problem. There are various versions, but it goes something like this:

  There is a runaway trolley heading down the tracks. Ahead of it, you see five people tied up and unable to escape. You’re standing far from the train yard, but you’re next to a lever. You know if you pull the lever, the trolley will switch to a different track—but that track has one person tied to it, also unable to escape. You have only two options—leave well enough alone, while five people die, or pull the lever, so five may
live while one will die. Which option is the right choice?

  Depending on how the problem is phrased, people’s answers can vary. But in many cases, around 90 percent of respondents say they would pull the lever—kill the one to save the five.

  * * *

  In a variant of the trolley problem, the survey results tend to change. This version says there is only the one track, with the five potential victims. And you are on a footbridge over the track. Although you are not near a lever, you are next to a very large person who, unlike you, would surely stop the trolley due to his size. He only needs a little shove.

  In this case, the numbers nearly reverse: people have a harder time with the thought of physically pushing someone to his death, even to save more people. A recent study by “neuroethicists” put people in a functional MRI (fMRI) machine to study what their brains were doing during this conundrum. The different stories—just words, mind you—caused markedly different activity in the parts of the brain that wrestle over what we think of as “morality.”

  And not only were they just words that caused these people’s bodies to have such varying responses; the words described situations. And those situations presented very different bodily contexts. It would seem the presence of a lever and the distance from what happens when it is pulled allows people to be more detached and utilitarian, whereas the thought of one’s body pushing another body off a bridge is too close for comfort, no matter the moral calculus.

  * * *

  We are surrounded by levers. Levers that control things we see, and things we don’t. Levers that control levers, which control even more levers. These levers are made of ones and zeros, and they can mean one thing a second ago and a different thing right now. They can even make new levers; they can learn to think. They multiply, ripple, and coalesce into the vast, invisible oceans of information around us...on us...through us.

  * * *

  For a while, when trying to explain to people what information architecture is, I’d joke that it was really “just getting paid for metaphysics.” It rarely got more than a quizzical chuckle; it’s not a very funny rejoinder, I suppose. My intended effect was self-deprecation—like saying “they pay me to blow hot air.” But then I realized, I was just working out my anxieties about my professional identity. I’m still working them out.

  * * *

  Anyway, back to metaphysics. It’s hard to define, even though it’s one of the oldest branches of philosophy. Mostly it’s about trying to answer big questions about being and understanding. Not just “what is in the world, and how does it work?” but “why does it work that way, and what does that mean?” Science eventually answered many of the questions of early metaphysics. But measurement can’t answer everything. Even with all our scientific knowledge, when the empiricist says, “this is a brick,” the metaphysician still has to ask, “but what is brick?”

  * * *

  It’s funny, metaphysics started as merely an editorial label. “Meta” roughly means “beyond” or “after” in Greek. Early editions of Aristotle’s writings usually placed his work on “physics” first, then appended the other work, “after” the physics content, and labeled it as meta-physics. Aristotle himself didn’t call it that; he used a phrase meaning “first philosophy” for the subject matter that his posthumous editors placed (ah, irony) last.

  So, even the name of this ancient conversation is tangled with the nature of objects, order, and labels. Of course, in later centuries scholars took this literally to mean “do not learn this other ‘metaphysics’ stuff until you’ve first learned the physics.” Time and context have a complicated relationship.

  * * *

  There’s really nothing that matters to us as humans that isn’t somehow wrapped up in language. The ancients who first used the word “poet” were using a word that meant “maker”—because they understood that their poets made more than poems. They made worlds.

  We’ve always been a linguistic sort of animal, immersed in symbol, suffused with story. But, we now have to call upon our uncanny ability to make sense with a degree of commitment and rigor we might never have summed before. The digital world we’ve made requires it. Where we are, who we are, what we are: these are big questions, not just for philosophers.

  * * *

  So much of our work is for mundane market needs, operational efficiencies, iterative improvements. Now and then, if we’re lucky, we get to work on “meaningful” projects. At least, that’s one way to look at it.

  But from another perspective, we’re always working with meaning. And people spend most of their time in these mundane, everyday places—office cubicles, grocery stores, highways, living rooms. Think of all the meaning, in aggregate, that can be a little more good, a little more clear. Working on the answers to big, hard questions is worthwhile even when it leads to making things better in small, soft ways, where people really live. It seems to me that’s the context where all of this stuff matters the most.

  * * *

  When I checked the definition for coda, I learned it comes from the Italian for “tail.” It evoked an image I can’t seem to shake: an elephant, wearing pajamas, who has been my companion for many months, nearly filling my rooms as it worked its way slowly through my house.

  And now, I watch as my strange companion has found its way, finally, to my home’s rear exit. It squeezes its bulk past the door’s narrow affordance, and its dangling tail—this coda—is the last thing I see as the creature lumbers happily into the world.

  I know that’s not what the word really means. I suppose that’s just what I bring to it.

  Appendix B. About the Author

  Andrew Hinton is an information architect at The Understanding Group (TUG). Since the early ‘90s, he’s been helping organizations of various shapes and sizes make better, more habitable places with information. Andrew is co-founder and past board member of the IA Institute, and is a frequent speaker at UX and other industry conferences. From his pre-consultant life, he holds an MA in Literature and an MFA in Poetry. He presently lives with his wife in Atlanta, where his daughter often visits, and their dog, Sigmund, finally has a big yard of his own. You can find links to Andrew-related things, including this book, at andrewhinton.com.

  Appendix C. Understanding Context

  O’REILLY

  To make sense of the world, we’re always trying to place things in context, whether our environment is physical, cultural, or something else altogether. Now that we live among digital, always-networked products, apps, and places, context is more complicated than ever—starting with “where” and “who” we are.

  This practical, insightful book offers a powerful toolset to help product and service designers understand and solve the challenges of contextual ambiguity. Information architects, interaction designers, and other software and UX professionals will discover not only how to design for a given context, but also how design participates in making context.

  Learn how people perceive context when touching and navigating digital environments.

  See how labels, relationships, and rules work as building blocks for context.

  Find out how to make better sense of cross-channel, multi-device products or services.

  Discover how language creates infrastructure in organizations, software, and the Internet of Things.

  Learn models for figuring out the contextual angles of any user experience.

  Andrew Hinton is an information architect at The Understanding Group, and a founding member of the IA Institute. He helps organizations—from Fortune 500s to small non-profits—make better, more habitable places with information.

  For more about Andrew and the book, visit andrewhinton.com.

  “Andrew takes us on a journey from not knowing to knowing; he asks good, interesting questions about the role context plays in the design and architecture of understanding.”

  —Richard Saul Wurman

  “...come away better situated in a world remade (but not replaced) by technology,
and get ready to give it better architecture.”

  —Malcolm McCullough author, Ambient Commons

  “Andrew’s book helps us perceive, make sense of, and engage with the contexts that surround us...”

  —Louis Rosenfeld founder, Rosenfeld Media

  INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE/UX

  Twitter: @oreillymedia

  facebook.com/oreilly

  Index

  A note on the digital index

  A link in an index entry is displayed as the section title in which that entry appears. Because some sections have multiple index markers, it is not unusual for an entry to have several links to the same section. Clicking on any link will take you directly to the place in the text in which the marker appears.

  A

  A city is not a tree (Architectural Form), Perspectives and Journeys

  abstraction