Understanding Context

by Andrew Hinton

  * * *

  Here’s what got me started:

  For a long time—since before I worked with technology for a living—I’ve wondered about how it is that language makes experience. How is it that a novel can captivate us and make us feel as if we’ve lived through those events? How does a table-top game construct a shared place in which events occur that we might remember and talk about years later, even though nothing “real” happened? Why is it that a poet can break a line—in just such a way that it breaks the reader’s heart?

  When I eventually found myself in a software-related profession, my obsession only grew. When logging in to a system to move files around, what is it I’m affecting with commands such as “get” or “put.” It’s just bits, being rearranged on the same disc, but somehow those words make it relevant to my body. When exploring early social architectures such as UseNet, Internet Relay Chat, or later, LiveJournal, I noticed how deeply I sometimes felt about my conversations there, and how these places were meaningful as places. How is that possible? They’re just virtual marks on virtual surfaces, which aren’t even as real as the printed type in a paper book.

  Soon, I found a community where many people were wondering similar things. They were talking to one another under a loosely shared label: information architecture. Something about that phrase clicked for me—yes, I thought, that’s what’s going on: information that somehow feels as if we live in it; structures, rooms, passageways. Not virtual reality, exactly. It’s information that shares some of the qualities of space, whose places become as meaningful for us as any other places in our lives.

  As someone who now identifies as an “information architect,” I kept working at these questions, until it occurred to me that so much of what I was doing for a living was repairing problems with context. Software is doing something to the world that is detaching and rupturing context from whatever helped it make sense before we had computers, networks, and hyperlinks. Eventually, with encouragement, and after many conference talks and articles, I decided to write a book about that.

  * * *

  When you start writing a book about something, suddenly ideas that you thought you had all figured out seem flimsy and unformed. After finishing what I thought was the first third of the book, I grew worried—what if none of what I think about this is true? So, I did some further research to validate my hunches.

  I discovered my hunches were sometimes on track, and often really wrong, and that this thing we call context is actually not well understood. Among academics, there is rigorous work being done, but it isn’t exactly settled science. Yet, even the best of that work wasn’t making it into the general conversation of design practitioners and in the popular “UX” literature.

  I realized that if I were to take this book seriously, I couldn’t just think aloud on the page about what the answers might be. So, six months into my work, I had to set aside the chapters I’d already drafted and take the time to really learn the subject as best I could, while writing about what I was discovering. A couple years and quite a few pages later, here I am revising the preface for publication.

  Here’s the thing: I’m not finished. The more I learned, the more I saw there would be to discover. Hence, as I mentioned at the beginning, “understanding” is something I hope we can do together, both in this book and beyond it. To that end, I invite you to visit this book’s home site (www.contextbook.com), where additional content and links will accumulate, including a bibliography.

  My wish for these ideas isn’t that they be absolutely right (though some of that is nice), but that they help move along the work we do together toward making better places, good and human places, for the people who dwell in them.

  So, now, let’s dig in.

  Acknowledgments

  I WANT MOST OF ALL TO THANK MY WIFE, Erin, who has been a patient supporter through the long, often angst-ridden process of writing this book. She not only went without a husband for many weekends, evenings, and so-called vacation days; she then weathered my verbose ruminations and bouts of self-doubt when I was in her presence. She doesn’t believe it, but it’s true that I could not have done this without her.

  Thanks also to Madeline, my daughter, who has also endured my authorial tribulations, and who has been such an inspiration to me as I’ve watched her grow up, tackle huge challenges, and already become so much more than I could’ve imagined.

  Thanks to Peter Morville, who told me a long time ago, regarding a completely different subject, “you should write a book,” and who then helped me find a path to get it done, with wise counsel along the way. Also thanks to Lou Rosenfeld, who has also given me such generous encouragement and advice over the years. And thanks to Christina Wodtke, especially for that email invitation circa 2001, and all the invaluable conversations since.

  A special thanks to Dan Klyn and Bob Royce, who both have enriched and influenced my perspective on this book’s subject, and who invited me along on their joint mission to bring “making things be good” to the world—something they called The Understanding Group. I can’t imagine any other vocational home giving me the room to work out these ideas and be the self I needed to be while writing this book.

  There are many other wonderful people who have contributed their energy and care in ways large and small toward making this book happen; some have been sources of conversations and knowledge that have become part of the book’s fabric, and some have even taken time out of their lives to review drafts and help make the book better. I can’t possibly list them all, but I should especially mention, Jorge Arango, Andrea Resmini, Abby Covert, Marsha Haverty, Andrew Wilson, Sabrina Golonka, Karl Fast, Dave Gray, Christian Crumlish, Richard Dalton, Lis Hubert, Malcolm McCullough, and Don Norman.

  Thanks also to a mentor from what seems like a previous life, poet and teacher Jeffrey Skinner, for telling me I’m a writer and showing me what it means to be one. When I catch myself just talking about something I could make or do, I hear his rightfully impatient voice from decades ago, saying, “Stop talking about it and just do it!” He also taught me it’s better to be done than perfect, advice without which I would still be researching, writing, and revising this tome.

  Thanks to my publisher, meaning everyone there who played a part in making this book a reality. When I started working with O’Reilly, I wasn’t sure how it would turn out. I knew I wasn’t writing something that fit a standard “technology book” mold, but I also knew that O’Reilly was one of the first publishers that really mattered to me—starting with the copy of The Whole Internet User’s Guide and Catalog I found in 1992—and that O’Reilly’s deeply humanist vision would make a good home for my wandering, philosophical ideas about information technology. Sure enough, I found everyone involved to be thoughtful and welcoming, patient with my journey but responsible in prodding me along. So, in particular to Mary Treseler, Simon St. Laurent, Amy Jollymore, and Meghan Blanchette, I want to thank you all for your belief in this project, your encouragement when I struggled, and your kind guidance through the entire process.

  Finally, to my mother, Mary; my dad, George; and (in memoriam) my stepfather, Paul: thank you for getting me to adulthood, showing me what was possible if I took the time to do something right, and teaching me that—with hard work—I could accomplish what I set out to do.

  Part I. The Context Problem

  What It Is and How to Think About It

  PEOPLE HAVE BEEN TRYING TO FIGURE OUT HOW WE UNDERSTAND THE WORLD FOR A VERY LONG TIME; and from all evidence, there are no certain answers for many of the most important questions. So, it would seem that writing a book about “context” would be a fool’s errand. Why try to tackle it to begin with? What do we mean by it when we say it? And after going to all this trouble, what real-world problems will it help us to solve?

  Figure I.1. A seventeenth-century illustration by Robert Fludd, illustrating his somewhat occult, prescientific ideas on metaphysics, bodily senses, thought, and inspiration[1]

  Part
I helps to answer these questions. It introduces the basic challenges of a growing “context problem” to establish reasons why we should bother with understanding context at all. It also presents common scenarios to help illustrate those challenges. Finally, it introduces a working definition of context, and some models we will use to explore how information works to create and shape context in the chapters to come.

  * * *

  [1] Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris [...] historia, tomus II (1619), tractatus I, sectio I, liber X, De triplici animae in corpore vision (from Wikimedia Commons)

  Chapter 1. Everything, Yet Something

  All and everything is naturally related and interconnected.

  —ADA LOVELACE

  Birds in Trees, Words in Books

  IT WOULD BE GREAT to say there’s a simple secret that lets us figure out a subject such as context quickly and easily. But let’s not kid ourselves; context is a big, hairy, weird topic. By nature, it’s about everything. And if something is about everything, how can we even begin to understand it? When we think we’ve caught it and we try to crack it open to see what’s inside, all we seem to get is more context. It’s the stuff of late-night dorm conversations among philosophy students, or tedious debates among philosophers and physicists. Context shifts and dances, it slips and slides. It insists on its mystery, yet it demands we come to terms with it every single day.

  Still, in some ways, context actually isn’t so mysterious, because from one moment to the next we seem to know it when we see it. Whenever we’re trying to figure out what one thing means in relation to something else, we say we’re trying to understand its context.

  It can be a bird in a tree, or a stone in a stream. It can be a single word in a sentence. It can also be that sentence in a paragraph, that paragraph in a book, and that book’s context in a library or on a bedside table—all of which can influence how we interpret the single word where we started.

  It can be the context of a text message I receive on my phone, where a “:-)” emoticon can make the difference between an insult and a friendly jest. It can be a channel as in “cross-channel” design, like mobile, desktop, telephone, or broadcast. Or, it can be all those channels, but from the separate perspectives of a child and a senior citizen, or a user on a bus versus a customer in a store. It can be also the context of one’s own identity, and how one behaves around family versus the workplace. The more closely we look, the more we see how many parts of our lives depend upon context for meaning anything at all.

  Whatever context is in any given situation, though, one aspect remains consistent: we need context to be clear and to make sense. We know that when context is not clear or it doesn’t make sense, it means we don’t understand something. And misunderstandings are almost always not good.

  How do we get beyond this general sense of “good” or “clear” or “understandable”? What makes anything more clear or not clear? These are philosophical questions with practical implications. So let’s begin with a practical scenario involving an airport, a calendar, and getting from one place to another.

  Scenario: Andrew Goes to the Airport

  On the morning before a cross-country business flight, I was already getting packed. I knew a seven-day trip would mean extra effort compressing everything into my small carry-on bag, and an early departure meant no time to pack on the day of the trip. While rolling my shirts into tight bars of cloth to prevent wrinkles—wrinkles I knew would manifest anyway regardless of my efforts—my iPhone started trilling and buzzing. Two apps on my phone—one from Delta Airlines and the other from the TripIt travel service—were each reminding me I could check in and get my digital boarding pass.

  I opened the Delta app and tapped my way through the check-in process. After a few steps, it offered me an “Economy Comfort” seat for just a few dollars more. Because I don’t especially like folding myself into my laptop like human origami, I agreed to pay for the perk. I half wondered if now being “Economy Comfort” would give me any other privileges, but I was busy, so I decided to find out when I got to the airport.

  To economize a bit and get a better fare, I’d decided to depart from an airport a bit further from home. On the day of the flight, when I arrived inside the terminal, I realized I wasn’t used to this airport and found myself having to learn a new layout. I scanned the environment in front of me, thinking through the options. I didn’t need to print a boarding pass, and I didn’t need to check my luggage bin–sized bag, so I looked for the right queue for going through the TSA security check.

  Similar to my usual airport, this one had queue lanes organized by various categories. I was so used to going to a particular lane at my home airport that I hadn’t thought about how they were labeled in a long time.

  One was for fast-track-security TSA Pre-Check passengers, which I was pretty sure I wasn’t (though I also wasn’t sure how I would know). One was for “SkyPriority” flyers, and that one made me wonder: I was a “Medallion” member of Delta’s SkyMiles program, but I only had a “Silver” Medallion. I was also a holder of Delta’s branded American Express Gold card, which provides some of the benefits of Medallion status, but not others. (Even though the card is “Gold,” it has nothing to do with the “Gold Medallion” level in Delta’s loyalty hierarchy.) In my hurried state, I couldn’t remember if Silver Medallion qualified me as “SkyPriority” or if my Gold Card did, or if Economy Comfort got me in, or if none of these conditions applied.

  I approached a Delta service representative and asked where I should go. She said, “Let me see your boarding pass; it will say if you’re SkyPriority.” I got out my iPhone and opened the Delta app to show her. But no dice—I couldn’t get it to open the boarding pass. The app was having to recheck the network to update the boarding information, and couldn’t reach the cloud for some reason, even though the phone’s WiFi indicator had full bars. What was happening? Then, the phone popped up a screen about paying for airport WiFi access. Ah, so my phone was naively assuming it had Internet access because it was connecting to WiFi, but the Internet was not available without payment. How annoying.

  I had no time to fuss with that in the moment. So, I fumbled until I turned WiFi off, allowing me to use my carrier’s data network instead. But that didn’t help either—I couldn’t get a signal inside the building. I had to apologize and walk back outside for a cell connection to get my digital boarding pass to update.

  I then saw a button on the boarding pass inviting me to “Add to Passbook.” I had heard of Apple’s Passbook app but just hadn’t used it yet. Thinking maybe this would help me avoid the forced-data-refresh issue, I added the Delta pass to the Passbook app. I also noticed there was no mention of SkyPriority or any other special security line status, so I reentered the terminal and used the slower queue, with all the other standard travelers.

  Figure 1-1. Some of the many contextual structures to keep track of, just to get to my plane on time

  While waiting in line, I noticed that every time I tapped my phone’s Home button to bring up the unlock screen, there was a notification about my flight. I hadn’t seen this sort of alert before. I tried swiping it to either dismiss it or open the app that was generating it, but that only brought up a strange-looking version of my boarding pass. It was odd behavior because normally I can’t interact with apps when the phone is in locked mode, other than a few things such as audio controls. I wondered if the notification engine on the phone was on the fritz, so I rebooted the phone—no change. By then it was time to go through security anyway, so I just showed my boarding pass and ID and then finished the tedium of the security screening.

  After finishing the security ritual and getting my belt and shoes back onto my body, I received a text message from my employer’s operations manager, asking about my travel schedule. I answered back that my itinerary should be on my calendar. I could see it on my iOS Calendar app; why couldn’t he? I finally just told him the details and said I’d try to figure out the calendar prob
lem later.

  TripIt had just alerted me via text message which gate I should use for my flight, so I kept glancing at the message to remind myself where I should go in the airport. Eventually, I made it to the correct gate, following signs and pointers along the airport passageways.

  At the gate, I heard the airline associate announce who could board and when, over the public address system. I waited until I heard the category I saw listed on my boarding pass—Zone 1—and boarded when it was called. Then, I had one more label to follow, my seat number. On this flight, I was known as the passenger in 24 C. I finally plopped into it, pondering all the confusing things I’d just encountered.

  Breaking It Down

  In scenarios like this, we find ourselves in a tangle of digital, semantic, and physical structures. We are agents trying to take action in our environments, and we have to understand those environments well enough to take the appropriate actions. For myself, even though I’m a frequent traveler, I was still running into issues that caused me to have to stop, think, and figure out my environment. When I’d try to act out of habit, it would either work or it wouldn’t, depending on how the environment accommodated my action. Each element of the environment made a demand on my ability to understand what I was doing. These moving parts were all in play at a wide variety of environmental levels, from the broad level of a mobile phone network, to the level of a little virtual switch deep in the settings of my phone. Some required almost no effort, but many required a lot, to the point that I was reduced to talking to myself to figure them out.