Understanding Context

by Andrew Hinton

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  [112] Gibson, J. J. The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966:201.

  [113] ———. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979:13.

  [114] ———. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979:18–19.

  [115] ———. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979:254.

  [116] ———. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979:100.

  [117] Epstein, Nadine. “In Search of the God of Understanding.” Moment (momentmag.com) September-October 2013.

  [118] Gibson, J. J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979:15.

  [119] ———. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979:117.

  [120] Goldstein, E. Bruce. “The Ecology of J. J. Gibson’s Perception.” Leonardo Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1981;14(3):191–195. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1574269.

  [121] Gibson, J. J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979:87.

  [122] ———. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979:141.

  [123] ———. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979:130.

  [124] ———. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979:9.

  [125] Wagman, Jeffrey B., and David B. Miller. “Animal-Environment Systems: Energy and Matter Flows at the Ecological Scale.” Wiley Periodicals, 2003 (http://bit.ly/1vX9ZrJ).

  [126] ———. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979:9.

  [127] ———. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979:16.

  [128] ———. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979:307.

  [129] ———. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979:17.

  [130] ———. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979:241.

  [131] Bodies and Environments; earlier this chapter.

  [132] Dotov D. G., L. Nie, A. Chemero. “A Demonstration of the Transition from Ready-to-Hand to Unready-to-Hand.” PLoS ONE 2010;5(3):e9433. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0009433.

  [133] Gibson, J. J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979:241.

  [134] ———. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979:307.

  [135] Weinberger, David. Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory Of The Web. New York: Basic Books, 2002:39.

  [136] https://twitter.com/JeffElder/status/431673279128936449

  [137] Smith, Aaron. “The Best (and Worst) of Mobile Connectivity.” Pew Internet & American Life Project, November 30, 2012 (http://bit.ly/1oneutq).

  [138] Mlot, Stephanie. “Infographic: Mobile Use in Developing Nations Skyrockets.” PC Magazine July 18, 2012 (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2407335,00.asp).

  [139] Karlson, Amy K.,1 Brian R. Meyers,1 Andy Jacobs,1 Paul Johns,1 and Shaun K. Kane2. “Working Overtime: Patterns of Smartphone and PC Usage in the Day of an Information Worker,” (http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/80165/pervasive09_patterns_final.pdf).

  [140] Gibson, J. J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979:307.

  [141] ———. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979:148.

  [142] ———. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979:128.

  [143] ———. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979:307.

  [144] ———. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979:242.

  [145] ———. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979:94.

  [146] ———. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979:110.

  [147] ———. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979:100.

  [148] Kuniavsky, Mike. Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann, 2010:3.

  [149] Popova, Maria “Why Time Slows Down When We’re Afraid, Speeds Up as We Age, and Gets Warped on Vacation,” brainpickings.org July 15, 2013.

  [150] The points following all come from Gibson, 1979, pp. 240–241.

  Chapter 7. What Humans Make

  Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

  —MARK TWAIN

  The Built Environment

  AS HUMANS, WE ARE the source of much of the environment we live in, including roads, buildings, and cities, as well as the social interactions and relationships we have, which influence our choices and behaviors every day. Architects and engineers refer to the human-made structures as the built environment. Although there are certainly big differences between the built environment and the natural one, our perception of context comes from the same cognitive capabilities, whether we’re surrounded by towering skyscrapers or giant redwoods. From the human point of view, the products of our culture are separate from nature, but from the planet’s point of view, our environments emerged from the activity of our species not unlike an ant hill or bee hive. “There is only one world, however diverse, and all animals live in it,” says J. J. Gibson.[151] No matter how much plastic and electricity we use, our built environment is still made of substances, surfaces, objects, and events.

  Even though people have been building things for a long time, the study of how cognition works among these structures is fairly recent. One landmark work is the 1960 book by Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (MIT Press), which presents a framework for analyzing the contours of urban environments and understanding them in human terms. It was the result of a five-year study interviewing and observing inhabitants of several American cities. Lynch’s focus was on the form of built urban environments—their physical, structural properties and the clues they provide.

  Even though it was not an expressly ecological-psychology work, there are strong parallels between Gibson’s concepts and those of Lynch, whose elements of urban form (Paths, Edges, Districts, Nodes, Landmarks) are preoccupied with how people navigate and learn the surfaces, objects, layouts, and places of a city. As a way of talking about coherent invariant cues, Lynch proposes the concept of imageability—the “legibility,” or understandability, of the urban landscape. Lynch also introduces a new use of an older term (previously used mainly for things such as navigation by compass and maps), wayfinding, for how people use sensory cues from the environment to work their way through it.

  Lynch points out that “the image of a given physical reality may occasionally shift in its type with different circumstances of viewing. Thus an expressway may be a path for the driver, and edge for the pedestrian.”[152] This idea is similar to the shifting nested quality of the environment in ecological terms, and also similar to the idea of a creature’s umwelt. Lynch also found that, as people lived in a city longer, the elements in the environment they relied upon might shift from, for example, particular paths to a broader set of landmarks and nodes; in a sense, their umwelt changed over time, as their perception learned and internalized patterns.[153] Lynch also found that, even though his framework breaks the city down into components, people don’t rely on that sort of parsing; rather, they take it all in as one integrated environment.[154] More recent research reinforces that wayfinding is tied to embodiment, finding that people could remember more accurate details about their environment if they were more “cognitively active” way-finders versus “cognitively passive.” This means that people who drive or walk themselves places tend to remember more about the built environment than those who ride in vehicles that others are driving.[155]


  Built environments might be perceived with the same principles that drive perception of the natural world; artificial structures can exert great influence on how people perceive a layout as a place or not. Recall the field and the stone wall in Chapter 3: in a sense, the wall makes a strong argument about what the perceiver should experience, splitting parts of the field into one place separated from another. We could do the same with just signage and names, as with a parking sign that indicates parking is legal on the left, but illegal on the right. And as we will see, in software, the language establishes the structure of the territory itself.

  Over the years, wayfinding has become a design field in its own right. For example, a classic text by Paul Arthur and Romedi Passini, Wayfinding: People, Signs, and Architecture (McGraw-Hill), takes some of the essential ideas from Lynch and runs with them, adding more insights on how people learn urban places. Unlike Lynch, they add significant content focused on how signage in the built environment shapes how people understand it.

  Alas, their book is now out of print. The bulk of books and materials on wayfinding now focus mainly on the design of signage rather than the intrinsic, physical-information qualities of buildings and cities. I bring this up because it’s important to realize that, for context design, physical information—the surfaces and objects of the environment—are core to how all creatures find their way and learn places. Signage is part of the semantic information we will look at in Part III. In the built environment as well as in virtual environments such as digital interfaces, the physical shape of our surroundings is what we perceive most directly, with the least explicit effort.

  The Elusive “Cognitive Map”

  Kevin Lynch’s pioneering work on wayfinding relied heavily on a psychological concept called a cognitive map, a phrase that you will see often in research literature, usability guides, and experience-design textbooks and articles.

  The phrasing is actually unfortunate, because it can lead practitioners to assume that users have something like a map in their heads that gets filled in as they explore an environment, or that they have a stable “mental model” formed in their brains. Even according to traditional cognitive psychology, these maps are not stable or necessarily accurate, and can be distorted depending on many factors. And yet, the metaphor of a “map” in the brain persists. But there is no literal cognitive map we can point to inside people’s brains, just as there are no representational “pictures” in the brain—and no brain-dwelling observer to look at them with tiny eyeballs.

  It’s possible to memorize maps and make use of explicitly recalled semantic structures, but the typical wayfinding individual is using the environment itself more for recognition than recall, and attending to only the minimum information necessary. The body is significantly involved in the process of that learning. That’s why people don’t remember details of a traveled route as well if riding in a car compared to walking or jogging to their destination.[156]

  One problem with many wayfinding studies is that they rely on recollection after the fact, using verbal and written data from interviews and surveys. By the time interview subjects have articulated answers into language, they’ve moved from tacit awareness to explicit deliberation, which might not accurately describe their actual perception-and-action during wayfinding. For the same reasons, this distortion can also be a problem for user-testing in software design: asking users “Why are you doing that?” often causes them to invent a reason they convince themselves is real.

  Brains are, of course, involved in wayfinding and environmental learning, like all action, but it’s a matter of degree. When it’s crucial to memorize a map, the brain works overtime. Evidence shows that memorization of massive wayfinding data, such as what London cab drivers are required to do for their licenses, can actually cause the brain’s hippocampus to grow to an unusual size.[157] However, that is deliberate, purposeful memorization, as opposed to tacit engagement with familiar surroundings.

  The environment itself serves as an external map of physical and semantic information cues, most of it beyond our conscious awareness. A city’s layout, culture’s language, and the ever-present activity of other people serve as extended-cognitive scaffolding that have the models already in them, without our having to keep them in our heads. The environment that makes up someone’s context is inseparable from their ability to understand, learn, and navigate that environment. All the more reason why we have to make environments that are coherently structured so that user perception can make sense of them based on what they present to the perceiver in the moment, rather than some hoped-for map in the user’s head.

  The Social Environment

  The built environment isn’t made by or for just one person. Look around you; almost everything you’ll see that’s made by someone was made in a social context that involved conversation or collaboration of some kind. Humans are deeply social creatures, and other people are a critical part of our environment.

  For humans, other humans are a special class of animal—objects that are animate in the environment. Recognizing animals (and humans) as distinct and different from other objects is one of the first things human infants learn. As Gibson points out, they provide the “richest and most elaborate affordances” in our environment; “When touched they touch back, when struck they strike back; in short they interact with the observer and with one another. Behavior begets behavior.”[158] When things in the environment “touch back,” they are “interactive.” And human interaction is the standard against which we compare and comprehend all other interaction.

  We tacitly attend to our social context all the time to see how others are behaving or where they’re going, to gauge our actions against what feels like the normal behavior. You’ve probably had an experience in which you find yourself standing in a line unnecessarily because you assumed you were supposed to line up with everyone else, or you went to dinner with friends with a resolution to skip dessert, but ended up eating one anyway because everybody else was getting one.

  We also rely on other humans for much of our extended cognition and memory. A lot of what we assume to be objective reality is actually just what we absorb from the collective assumptions and perspectives of our respective societies; but like so many things that are deeply part of human life, we’re typically unaware of just how strongly the social environment affects our own thinking and behavior.

  Classic social psychology studies, such as the Asch Conformity Experiments in the 1950s, have shown social pressure can cause people to believe obviously incorrect “facts.” In one famous example, subjects were convinced by participants (who were secretly part of the study) that the line on the left card depicted in Figure 7-1 was not the same length as line C on the card on the right, even though it was.[159]

  Figure 7-1. Cards and lines like those used in the Asch Conformity Experiments

  More recently, studies have been showing that people are influenced in a more passive way, just by social behavior going on around them. One well-known finding from a few years ago discovered that obesity tends to be “contagious,” in the respect that the eating and activity behaviors of the people around us tend to affect our own daily habits.[160] This effect was later found to vary across cultures. Some were more prone to group pressure than others, but the principle still held.[161]

  In another example, passersby dropped money in a street musician’s hat eight times more often when they observed another person donating. When asked afterward why they donated, none of them said it was because they’d seen someone else do it. They all constructed reasons on the fly, such as “I liked the song he was playing” or “I felt sorry for the guy.”[162] These discoveries underscore the fact that we’re mostly not consciously aware of what our environment is influencing, socially or otherwise.

  Just using language describing the social behavior context can have a strong effect. In the United Kingdom, in an attempt to improve collections on delinquent taxes, the tax agency tried providing some social co
ntext:

  In one letter HMRC appealed to people’s sense of civic duty. “We collect taxes to make sure that money is available to fund the public services that benefit you and other UK citizens,” it read. “Even if one person fails to pay their taxes it reduces the services and resources that are provided.” Another used actual statistics: “Nine out of ten people in Britain pay their tax on time.”

  The results were dramatic: collections rates increased from 57 percent in 2008 to 86 percent in 2009, within similar portfolios of debt.[163] It bears repeating: these people were not physically watching others’ behavior; they were only reading about it, and yet that environmental pressure tacitly nudged them toward behaving differently in vast numbers.

  There’s a seemingly endless stream of studies like these from the social sciences. I think we’re fascinated with them because we are consistently taken by surprise by how little truly independent agency we actually have. Of course, lots of what we respond to in the social environment isn’t physical information but the social narrative in which we’re immersed—things we hear or read about or the belief systems in which we’re raised.