Synopses & Reviews
Technology is destabilizing the way we understand our surroundings. From social identity to ubiquitous mobility, digital information keeps changing what here means, how to get there, and even who we are. Why does software so easily confound our perception and scramble meaning? And how can we make all this complexity still make sense to our users?
Understanding Context, a new book by Andrew Hinton, offers a powerful toolset for grasping and solving the challenges of contextual ambiguity. By starting with the foundation of how people perceive the world around them, it shows how users touch, navigate, and comprehend environments made of language and pixels, and how we can make those places better.
Some of what youll learn includes:
- How language creates infrastructure, in organizations, software applications, and the Internet of Things
- Essential elements of how users understand the environment through embodied cognition
- Models for figuring out the contextual angles of any user experience.
- How composition and narrative structure can create cohesion for users over time and across channels
- Why some places seem to make sense, and some don't, and why digital information makes sense-making even more challenging
- How information functions in three modes—physical, semantic, and digital—and stitch together the "maps we live in"
Understanding Context is ideal for information architects, user experience professionals, and designers of websites and applications of any scope. If what you design connects one context to another, you need this book.
Synopsis
Weve moved rapidly from a world where digital networks were specialized environments accessed via desktop computers to one where people spend most of their waking hours "on the grid" of networked digital devices, consumer objects, and physical places. From Facebook identity to ubiquitous mobility, technology keeps changing what "here" means, confounding deep assumptions our brains make about perception and meaning. Understanding Context provides a powerful toolset for understanding and solving the many problems created by contextual ambiguity.
This book is ideal for information architects, user experience professionals, and designers of medium-to-large websites and applications.
- Learn how to create "embodied cognition" to understand how users respond to digital products, devices, and environments
- Explore the difference between location-aware mobility (geographical context) versus simultaneous presence (virtual context)
- Discover how composition and narrative structure can create cohesion over time and across channels
- Learn strategies for dealing with the digital dimensions blurring of the line between map and territory
- Examine how contextual ambiguity complicates personal identity
Synopsis
To make sense of the world, were 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 provides a powerful toolset to help information architects, UX professionals, and web and app designers understand and solve the many challenges of contextual ambiguity in the products and services they create. Youll 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
About the Author
Since drawing D&D dungeons on graph paper at age 12, Andrew Hinton has had a passion for creating environments with information. And since before the advent of the Web, Andrew has been designing digital information environments of one kind or another, working with clients and employers of all shapes and sizes, from Fortune 500s to small non-profits, and from e-commerce to education.
Andrew is a well-known speaker, writer and long-time community member of the information architecture, interaction design & user experience fields, as well as a co-founder and past board member of the IA Institute. But besides all that, he's a dad, a husband and the keeper of a "spirited" Boston Terrier named Sigmund.
He now plies his trade as an Information Architect at the IA consulting firm known as The Understanding Group (aka TUG). (http://understandinggroup.com). And he keeps a home on the web at andrewhinton.com, which conveniently links to his blog at inkblurt.com. You'll also find him kvetching about whatever flotsam is on his mind via Twitter at @inkblurt.
Table of Contents
Praise for Understanding Context; Foreword; Preface; The Practical Bit; Who Should Read This Book?; So This Book Teaches Methods for Designing Context?; Why Information Architecture?; What Will You Learn from This Book?; A Tour Through the Book's Six Parts; The Personal Bit; Acknowledgments; The Context Problem; Chapter 1: Everything, Yet Something; 1.1 Birds in Trees, Words in Books; 1.2 Scenario: Andrew Goes to the Airport; 1.3 Breaking It Down; Chapter 2: A Growing Challenge; 2.1 Early Disruptions; 2.2 The Role of the Web; 2.3 Case Study: Facebook Beacon; Chapter 3: Environments, Elements, and Information; 3.1 A Wall and a Field; 3.2 A Conventional Definition of Context; 3.3 A New, Working Definition of Context; 3.4 Modes of Information; 3.5 Starting from the Bottom; Physical Information; Chapter 4: Perception, Cognition, and Affordance; 4.1 Information of a Different Sort; 4.2 A Mainstream View of Cognition; 4.3 Embodied Cognition: An Alternative View; 4.4 Action and the Perceptual System; 4.5 Information Pickup; 4.6 Affordance; 4.7 Directly Perceived versus Indirectly Meaningful; 4.8 Soft Assembly; 4.9 "Satisficing"; 4.10 Umwelts; Chapter 5: Attention, Control, and Learning; 5.1 A Spectrum of Conscious Attention; 5.2 Environmental Control; 5.3 Memory, and Learning the Environment; 5.4 What Does All This Mean for Design?; Chapter 6: The Elements of the Environment; 6.1 Invariants; 6.2 The Principle of Nesting; 6.3 Surface, Substance, Medium; 6.4 Objects; 6.5 Layout; 6.6 Events; 6.7 Place; Chapter 7: What Humans Make; 7.1 The Built Environment; 7.2 The Social Environment; 7.3 Meaning, Culture, and "Product"; Semantic Information; Chapter 8: How Language Works; 8.1 Looking at Language; 8.2 Signs: Icons, Indexes, and Symbols; 8.3 The Superpowers of Symbols; 8.4 Signification Conflation; 8.5 Language Is Contextual; Chapter 9: Language as Infrastructure; 9.1 Language and the Body; 9.2 Structure of Speech; 9.3 The Role of Metaphor; 9.4 Visual Information; 9.5 Semantic Function; 9.6 Tools for Understanding; 9.7 Semantic Architecture; Chapter 10: The Written Word; 10.1 The Origins of Writing; 10.2 What Writing Does; 10.3 The Structure of Writing; 10.4 Rules and Systems; Chapter 11: Making Things Make Sense; 11.1 Language and "Sensemaking"; 11.2 Physical and Semantic Intersections; 11.3 Physical and Semantic Confusion; 11.4 Ducks, Rabbits, and Calendars; Digital Information; Chapter 12: Digital Cognition and Agency; 12.1 Shannon's Logic; 12.2 Digital Learning and Agency; 12.3 Everyday Digital Agents; 12.4 Ontologies; Chapter 13: Digital Interaction; 13.1 Interfaces and Humans; 13.2 Semantic Function of Simulated Objects; 13.3 Modes and Meaning; Chapter 14: Digital Environment; 14.1 Variant Modes and Digital Places; 14.2 Foraging for Information; 14.3 Inhabiting Two Worlds at Once; 14.4 Ambient Agents; The Maps We Live In; Chapter 15: Information as Architecture; 15.1 Contemplating "Cyberspace"; 15.2 Architecture + Information; 15.3 Expansive IA; 15.4 About Definitions; Chapter 16: Mapping and Placemaking; 16.1 Maps and Territory; 16.2 What Makes Places; 16.3 Railroads, Chickens, and Captain Vancouver; 16.4 Organizational Maps; Chapter 17: Virtual and Ambient Places; 17.1 Of Dungeons and Quakes; 17.2 The Porous Nature of Cyberplaces; 17.3 Augmented and Blended Places; 17.4 The Map That Makes Itself; 17.5 Metamaps and Compasses; Chapter 18: The Social Map; 18.1 Conversation; 18.2 Social Architectures; 18.3 "Proxemics" as a Structural Model; 18.4 Identity; 18.5 Collisions and Fronts; 18.6 The Ontology of Self; 18.7 Networked Publics; Composing Context; Chapter 19: Arrangement and Substance; 19.1 Composition in Other Disciplines; 19.2 Qualities of Composition; 19.3 Something to Walk On; Chapter 20: The Materials of Semantic Function; 20.1 Elements; 20.2 Labels and Ontology; 20.3 Relationships and Taxonomy; 20.4 Rules and Choreography; 20.5 The Organization as Medium; Chapter 21: Narratives and Situations; 21.1 People Make Sense Through Stories; 21.2 Intentions and Intersections; 21.3 The Tales Organizations Tell; 21.4 Situations over Goals; Chapter 22: Models and Making; 22.1 A Fresh Look at Our Methods; 22.2 Observing Context; 22.3 Perspectives and Journeys; 22.4 Structures for Tacit Satisficing; 22.5 Blueprints, Floor Plans, Bubbles, and Blobs; Coda; About the Author; Understanding Context;