context design (beta) chi atlanta nov 2012

CONTEXT DESIGN

Presented to CHI Atlanta | November 2012

@inkblurt @undrstndngAndrew Hinton The Understanding Group

INFORMATION AS ARCHITECTURE — beta

Thursday, November 29, 12

Andrew Hinton | @inkblurt

Why “beta” in my title slide?

This is a sort of “meta presentation” for ideas that are still in progress ...

(A note for Slideshare & PDF readers: there wasn’t time for me to fully annotate this talk, so it’s just slides; since I’ll no doubt be doing more of these in the future, I’ll be sure to fully annotate a later version down the road.Thanks to Atlanta CHI for the invitation - I had a great time doing this talk!)



What do we mean by “Information Environment”??

Part of where my obsession started



Context awareness & management in G+



iconfactory.com

Desktop App- Linear column- Serial feed- Narrow aperture- Peripheral attention

tweetdeck.com

Tweetdeck:- Multi-column- Filtered- Parallel feed- Very wide aperture- Central attention

SMS:- Single-message- No “feed”- Tiny aperture- Interruptive / alert

RSS Embed: - Decontextualized from Twitter apps or site

Website- Full view- Center of attention- Twitter controls architecture

Context can make Twitter a fundamentally difference experience.


http://rex-ny.com/work/wyly-theatre/animation





A street in Dublin: digital signage is spawning everywhere



Rather than starting with the technology, what if we start with people?



Situation

Agent Understand Subject

Context: an agent’s understanding of the relationship between a subject and a situation.



Situation

SubjectAgent Understand



Situation(s)

SubjectSubject Agent/

SubjectSubject

Subject

SubjectSubject

Subject

Subject

Subject

Understand???



Contextual Understanding involves Perception of

& Cognition about Information



By and large, as a field, we still have some very old assumptions about cognition.



THE GREATCHAIN OF BEING



“COGITOERGOSUM” *

* “At least, that’s what I think.”



Embodied Cognition



Weather Vane & Watt Steam Governor

For both, “thinking” and “acting” are products of their environment.


@inkblurt

ASIMO

Every use case mapped out for an artificial brain.

Supposedly made in our image.


@inkblurt

Can’t handle all the possible edge cases.


@inkblurt

“Big Dog”

Use cases not mapped out.

The architecture of the body does most of the “thinking.”

(The “brain” mainly manages sensors.)


@inkblurt

You can’t even kick this thing over.


@inkblurt

Sigmund



Toward An Integrated Model of Information Seeking and Searching -- Marcia Bates -- 2002

Marcia Bates

“Berrypicking”

Directed Searching ± 1%

Passive Awareness ± 80%

Borrowed from Pervasive Information Architecture, Resmini & Rosati



BEHAVIOR IS ORGANICThursday, November 29, 12


Cognition evolved from sensorimotor activity.



A scene in Rosemary’s Baby ...



Cinematographer talks about how shot was framed so audience would actually lean to the right to try seeing around the door frame in the shot where a character is mostly hidden while talking on the phone. See clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mas4zNdBhzo&feature=related (at 7:10)



Cognition still depends on the body - even for doing things that are just “thinking.”



Bodily experience, cognition, memory and symbols are interdependent.

Our perceptual systems “satisfice” their way through the world.



Cognition can extend into the environment.



Language extends our cognition.



“...Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.”

Lakoff / Johnson - Embodied Language



Language is Environment(ie ... Infrastructure)

Language is “a form of mind-transforming

cognitive scaffolding: a persisting,

though never stationary, symbolic edifice

[playing a] critical role in promoting

thought and reason”

- Andy Clark - Supersizing the Mind



“One morning I shot

an elephant in my

pajamas. How he got

into my pajamas I’ll

never know.”

Contextual clarity requires structure.



James J Gibson - Ecological Psychology



• Perception requires action. • There is no set of discrete “inputs and outputs” but a continuous

looping of perception & action.• We perceive the environment by “pick-up” of information in the

environment.• Information “pick-up” is perception of evidence of structural variation. • We perceive the environment in human-scale terms. • We perceive environment in a “nested” (vs logically hierarchical) way.• We perceive elements in the environment as invariant or variant - a big

part of contextual clarity for humans. • The concept for understanding this relationship between perceiver and

environment is “affordance.”

A few key ideas from Gibson on perception



More Gibson ...

Information Pickup Theory

This is not Gibson’s diagram, but mine; it is likely oversimplifying the theory.



Affordance

“... the perceived functional properties of

objects, places and events in relation to an

individual perceiver.” - JJ Gibson

Perception exists only insofar as we perceive affordances.



Ecological

Semantic Digital

Modes of “Information”

A creature’s “pick-up” of information about “affordance” in a surrounding environment.

Additional information “picked up” from the layer of language humans have added to the environment.

Encoding of language & logic so machines can efficiently & accurately transmit inputs & outputs.

Note: while it uses concepts from JJ Gibson, Marcia Bates & others, this model is not from their work.



Ecological & Semantic Info in Conflict ...



Which of these will accidentally tweet publicly?

Ecological Information /

Affordance for action.

Very little semantic or ecological

information about what

context I’m in



On the subway, you only need to know the semantic map.



Digital Information Mode leaking into a semantic context.



Semantic-information “place” signified by “account”

Digital architecture determining ecological & semantic context.



What is “card” in this environment?



diagram by @danklyn



What am I? What is my world? How do I exist in it?

Please describe a formal, explicit specification of a shared

conceptualization for purposes of structuring semantic data.

00101011100100101110100101

ONTOLOGY



Am I checked in or not??



Where am I? In a local store, or in a web store?



Coming soon ...

How context is a “composition” problem ...

Stay tuned!



Some resources mentioned in the talk ... Louise Barrett; Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Mindshttp://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Brain-Environment-Shape-Animal/dp/0691126445

James J Gibson: The Ecological Approach to Visual Perceptionhttp://www.amazon.com/Ecological-Approach-Visual-Perception/dp/0898599598

Andy Clark; Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extensionhttp://www.amazon.com/Supersizing-Mind-Embodiment-Cognitive-Philosophy/dp/0199773688

Paul Dourish; What We Talk About When We Talk About Context: http://www.dourish.com/publications/2004/PUC2004-context.pdf

Marcia Bates; Toward an Integrated Model of Information Seeking and Searching http://ptarpp2.uitm.edu.my/silibus/TOWARDANINTEGRATEDMODEL.pdf

(That is probably not everything, but it’s the main stuff; of course all these people have other books, articles, etc, that are all great ... )


http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Brain-Environment-Shape-Animal/dp/0691126445

http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Brain-Environment-Shape-Animal/dp/0691126445

http://www.amazon.com/Ecological-Approach-Visual-Perception/dp/0898599598

http://www.amazon.com/Ecological-Approach-Visual-Perception/dp/0898599598

http://www.amazon.com/Supersizing-Mind-Embodiment-Cognitive-Philosophy/dp/0199773688

http://www.amazon.com/Supersizing-Mind-Embodiment-Cognitive-Philosophy/dp/0199773688

http://www.dourish.com/publications/2004/PUC2004-context.pdf

http://www.dourish.com/publications/2004/PUC2004-context.pdf

http://ptarpp2.uitm.edu.my/silibus/TOWARDANINTEGRATEDMODEL.pdf

http://ptarpp2.uitm.edu.my/silibus/TOWARDANINTEGRATEDMODEL.pdf


Thank You.


context design (beta) chi atlanta nov 2012

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