putting ink to paper, Mr. Mandiberg’s physical copy of Wikipedia was out-of-date.
Astonishing as these figures are, this should be familiar enough ground. After all, we are still talking about a document, even if its size and rate of change happen on a previously unimaginable scale. But on another level, Wikipedia is also the place in which this publication is written. Much as medieval scriptoria provided the ideal environment for monks to hand-copy manuscripts, Wikipedia provides the environment where a small army of mostly anonymous editors and writers can create an organic, networked, decentralized, massive text.
Wikipedia may not have a roof and walls, but it’s very much a place. It provides the structures, navigation systems, and rules of engagement that enable over 100,000 people to spend at least an hour every day working there, and for the rest of us to get delightfully lost exploring the many nooks they’ve created.11 Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, is not so much its editor-in-chief, but rather the architect of an environment that made it possible for Wikipedia to emerge from the collective efforts of a large group of globally distributed contributors, most of whom he will never meet. Much like our monumental buildings, Wikipedia-as-place is also laden with meaning as a representative artifact of a new type of culture that works, thrives, and lives in information. No physical place could do these jobs better.
For the most part, the people who design websites and apps have thought of them either primarily as products or services, not as places. While wayfinding has long been part of the digital design discussion, it’s been primarily deployed in service for facilitating access to information. With the growing pervasiveness of information systems in our daily lives, placemaking has started to emerge as a primary concern in the design of information systems. Books such as Malcolm McCullough’s Digital Ground (2004), Andrea Resmini and Luca Rosati’s Pervasive Information Architecture (2011), Martin Dade-Robertson’s The Architecture of Information (2011), and Andrew Hinton’s Understanding Context (2014) all make compelling cases for consciously crafting contexts with software.
Software-based experiences have become central to our ability to act skillfully. Thinking about them as products, publications, or services is not serving our needs well. If we are to move our shops, schools, singles bars, and third places online, it behooves us to look at how such places have accommodated our needs successfully in the past. Approaching software design as a placemaking activity—with a focus on intended outcomes and behavior rather than on forms or interactions—results in systems that can serve our needs better in the long term. In order to do so, we first need to unpack how environments affect our behavior. That will be the focus of the next chapter.
We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.
—Winston Churchill
CHAPTER
2
Context
Take a moment to look around you now and then come back to this paragraph. While your attention is currently focused on these words, your body is located somewhere in space; maybe it’s a room in your house or a bench in a park. Your body’s relationship with these surroundings will have an important impact on your experience of reading this book. The configuration of the space you’re in is either conducive to the task of reading, or it isn’t. Is it too loud? Too cold? Is there enough light? Are there other things clamoring for your attention?
You can read more easily in a library than in a bustling nightclub. These two environments create contexts that facilitate very different goals. Your body reacts to cues in these environments in predictable ways: The library encourages you to be quiet and contemplative, a behavior that aids your comprehension of texts, while the nightclub encourages you to socialize.
If you were raised in a culture that has libraries, being in an environment that has the cues you associate with a library will influence your behavior in specific ways. For example, you know what you can expect to do there and what is expected of you as a participant in that type of environment. As designers, we can design these cues: we know some elements and forms lend themselves to reading while others lend themselves to partying.
It’s not just physical environments such as libraries and nightclubs that create contexts; information environments create them, too. Just as a library’s components make it possible for you to read, the components of a bank’s website or mobile application make it possible for you to do your banking. As with the library, the online bank’s cues can be designed to create a context conducive to “good banking”—and to put you in the banking mindset—whatever that means for the bank’s customers.
Thus, if we want to design information environments that truly serve our needs, we must start by understanding how context works and—more specifically—how we can use language to create particular contexts.
Information architect Andrew Hinton offered a very useful working definition of context in his book Understanding Context:
Context is an agent’s understanding of the relationships between the elements of the agent’s environment.1
In the library example, you are the agent, and the library is the environment. The elements in this environment include the bookshelves, reading tables, chairs, walls, lights, and other accoutrements that make a library a library. These elements are laid out in relation to each other in particular ways—chairs alongside tables that have lights over them, for example—in order to facilitate your use of the place as a context for effective reading.
Your understanding of the context of a library is something that you’ve acquired through previous experiences in such an environment. Babies don’t know they’re supposed to be quiet in such a place—but you do, perhaps as a result of having been reprimanded by a librarian in the past (or seeing someone else be reprimanded).
I refer to you as an agent in the environment because your presence there changes the context. For one thing, you can physically change the form of the environment by moving stuff around. (The librarian may be most displeased!) For another, your mere presence there changes the context. Consider how your experience of being in the library might be affected if you were to suddenly run into Tom Hanks there. (I had this exact experience perusing the aisles in a bookshop in Los Angeles—an encounter that immediately changed my understanding of the context I was in.)
Where Are You and What Can You Do There?
Physical environments—buildings, towns, cities, parks, etc.—are designed artifacts, but we experience these things differently than other designed artifacts, such as iPhones and coffee table books. We experience buildings as urban environments that we inhabit; we move around and inside them, and their forms determine what we can do at any given time.
As we move through an environment, our senses register sights, sounds, smells, and so on. We slowly develop an understanding of the relationship between the different spaces that make up that place. We get a sense of what we can and can’t do there. At first, we must rely on our senses and think about what we’re doing. Eventually, it becomes second nature.
If you’ve ever visited a new city, you may have had the experience of being disoriented at first. As you move around, you register particular places in the environment: this is the hotel where I’m staying, one block north is the bakery with the beautiful croissants, two blocks further is the tram station, and so on. Given enough time in the environment, you eventually build a mental representation of the place. You no longer need a physical map to know where you’re going, since you’ve created a sort of internal map of the place.2 You know where you are relative to other parts of the environment, because you’ve internalized the parts of the environment and the relationships between them. As a result, you also become more adept at making predictions about what you’re likely to find next.
You don’t come to this experience as a blank slate. Your expectations