Understanding Context

by Andrew Hinton

  Meaning, Culture, and “Product”

  The built environment and the social environment are all part of what we loosely refer to as culture. Culture is something we don’t normally think about as culture. We take its cues and meanings for granted the way we take a tree or mountain for granted—it’s just there. Studying one’s own culture in an objective manner is a fairly recent concept.

  Culture brings with it environmental invariants that aren’t always physical. In fact, the parts of our environment that we think of as culture are mostly nonphysical, even when they’re about physical things. Figure 7-2 shows the famous Bilbao Guggenheim Museum in Spain, which is a functioning edifice made of physical materials, but most people who have heard of it or seen pictures of it understand it as uniquely shaped with cultural meaning far beyond its physical form.

  Figure 7-2. The Bilbao Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Gehry[164]

  Even a mundane object such as a mailbox has meaning to us that is mostly about cultural concepts. J.J. Gibson uses the mailbox as an example of something that affords action beyond its intrinsic qualities. From its physical information alone, a mailbox, such as the one presented in Figure 7-3, affords a simple concavity that can hold objects of a certain size, and that’s all. But, for a human who is “encultured” in using postal services, a mailbox offers the possibility of a more complex action—putting an addressed object into it, and expecting that the cultural system of postal services will take that object to the specified address. This is where cultural constructs and affordance overlap, from the first-person perspective of the perceiver.

  Figure 7-3. A mailbox in Denmark[165]

  This rich bundle of compound invariants requires the existence of many social systems working together, from educational (people need to know how to read and write letters and address them) to infrastructural (there needs to be some organized mechanism for moving mail around, even if it’s just carriers riding horses), not to mention economies that offer the purchasing and using of stamps and other forms of payment. The complex systems of our cultural environment are built up from information that eventually traces back to affordances, which undergird all of our activities, no matter how brain-based and abstract they have become.

  When designing a product, we are designing a new part of the human environment that will be placed within existing, living contexts made of other informing systems, whether those systems are towns and cities, or people, or other products.

  If we think of the product as a newly introduced set of capabilities, nested within the environment, it helps to clarify how we should design the product. Does it add capabilities that complement those that already exist? Does it present itself as clearly relevant to potential users who can understand new things only in the context of what they already understand?

  John Seely Brown, one-time technology chief for Xerox’s famed Palo Alto Research Center, better known as PARC, tells the story of how the early market for photocopiers was miniscule. Office workers were already making copies by using carbon sheets between pages in typewriters. They made all the copies they needed as they were typing the documents, simultaneously. A photocopier actually seemed to add complexity, requiring that you type the document first and then make copies of it on another machine altogether.

  What the market didn’t grasp yet was the potential value of being able to make unlimited copies from a single original, and even copies of that copy, and so on, having created the document only once. Seely Brown explains that it took great marketing work to create the right cultural interface between the technical innovation and the market.[166] People had to be told a story that reframed how they understood copying to begin with. The structures of the existing environment that constrained the number of copies one could make had set cultural expectations about what copying business documents meant. It created intrinsic, tacit constraints on the value people could see. It wasn’t just the object that mattered, but the object plus the language about it.

  Conversely, in a more recent example, consider the One Laptop per Child program. Founded on many laudable ideas, the program sought to put network-enabled, inexpensive, durable laptops in the hands of children in less-developed parts of the world.

  But the product’s designers made the mistake of developing the OLPC laptop—the XO—based on sound-yet-unconventional concepts about learning, community, and computing. Even though the product won many design awards, it found low acceptance in its intended populations. Why? Because the product wasn’t really suited to find a niche in the nested ecologies of its intended market. These societies were already adopting mobile phones as their personal-computing device of choice, where marketplace conventions and community norms had already emerged around using SMS and other simpler cell-based communications.[167] If their children were going to learn how to use a laptop, they wanted kids to learn the device as a business and workplace computer. So, they preferred that children learn Microsoft Windows and other conventional business software, rather than the elegant, theoretically sound Sugar operating system of the XO.[168]

  Writing about innovation, products, and business practices, John Seely Brown says, “Context has its own dynamics. It’s just like a garden. You can’t pick up a set of plants and just move them without understanding how the chemistry could be different, how the sun shining on the garden could be different. The whole notion of portability of best practices has been a major setback for understanding how situated technologies must be and how it is the content coming together with the context, and the interaction between the thing and the context, that produces value.”[169]

  Figure 7-4. The beautifully designed but contextually mismatched, OLPC XO laptop[170]

  Affordances create information that makes sense for action only in the context of interdependent, nested layers. A product—whether it takes the form of a mobile app, a “smart” device, or just a plain, old website—is more than a list of features. It’s part of a whole, just as vision isn’t only the parts of an eyeball, but an organically nested system throughout the body. A uniquely human dimension that we so often ignore is culture. And culture’s interface with human life is ultimately language, which we will explore in Part III.

  * * *

  [151] Gibson, J. J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979:130.

  [152] Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960:48.

  [153] ———. The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960:49.

  [154] ———. The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960:49.

  [155] Mondschein, Andrew, Evelyn Blumenberg, and Brian D. Taylor. “GOING MENTAL: Everyday Travel and the Cognitive Map.” Access 2013;43:2–7. http://www.uctc.net/access/43/access43_goingmental.shtml. (Thanks to Bogdan Stanciu for this reference.)

  [156] See reference in main text to GOING MENTAL: Everyday Travel and the Cognitive Map.

  [157] Jabr, Ferris. “Cache Cab: Taxi Drivers’ Brains Grow to Navigate London’s Streets” Scientific American (scientificamerican.com) December 8, 2011

  [158] Gibson, J. J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979:135.

  [159] Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Asch_experiment.png

  [160] Stein, Rob. “Obesity Spreads In Social Circles As Trends Do, Study Indicates.” Washington Post, July 26, 2007.

  [161] Watters, Ethan. “We Aren’t the World,” Pacific Standard (psmag.com) February 25, 2013.

  [162] Cialdini, Robert B. “Basic Social Influence Is Underestimated.” Psychological Inquiry 2005;16(4):158–161. Copyright © 2005 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

  [163] Martin, Steve. “98% of HBR Readers Love This Article,” Harvard Business Review (hbr.org) October 2012.

  [164] Wikimedia Commons: http://bit.ly/1xaxMA2

  [165] Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Postkasse_ubt.jpeg

  [166] One example of this story is found
in JSB’s essay “Changing the game of corporate research: Learning to thrive in the fog of reality” Technological Innovation. Oversights and Foresights. Edited by Raghu Garud, Praveen Rattan Nayyar, and Zur Baruch Shapira. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997:95–110.

  [167] Nussbaum, Bruce. “It’s Time To Call One Laptop Per Child A Failure,” Bloomberg Businessweek (businessweek.com) September 24, 2007.

  [168] Gaurav Chachra “Who Actually Needs Windows XP on the XO Laptop?” OLPC News (olpcnews.com) May 2, 2008.

  [169] http://www.johnseelybrown.com/evolutioninnovation.pdf

  [170] Wikimedia Commons: http://bit.ly/1xaxUzF

  Part III. Semantic Information

  Language as Environment

  SEMANTIC INFORMATION IS WHAT WE ADD TO THE ENVIRONMENT TO MAKE IT EVEN MORE RELEVANT AND USEFUL FOR HUMANS; it’s a mirror we use to reflect upon our experience and create narratives for explaining our environments to ourselves; it’s the primary interface between humans and the complex systems that humans create. As we will see, semantic information is an inseparable and crucial part of how context is shaped in the human environment.[171]

  Figure III.1. Semantic information

  In Part III, we cover basic concepts about what language is and how it works. We will see how symbols give us amazing flexibility in our environment but also how they come with challenges. We’ll also see how language works as a kind of environment, functioning in ways similar to but different from physical information, and how writing enhances and changes those properties. Finally, we’ll look at how physical and semantic information intersect and how technology adds even more flexibility to the mix, with more challenges to overcome.

  * * *

  [171] Moving forward, I’ll be using semantic information and language interchangeably; this would not work in a linguistics classroom, but for our purposes here, it will suit fine.

  Chapter 8. How Language Works

  Thought is made in the mouth.

  —TRISTAN TZARA

  Looking at Language

  TO UNDERSTAND HOW LANGUAGE FUNCTIONS AS SUCH A CRUCIAL PART of our environment, we need to look at how it manages to mean anything to begin with. That means understanding some basics about signs and symbols, the mechanisms of signification.

  Language is so much a part of human life, we hardly ever think about it explicitly. Like fish in water, we just use it as a sort of natural human medium. That’s one reason language works so well. If we had to ponder the depths of meaning for every utterance, we wouldn’t get much done. In everyday usage, we frankly treat language in much the same way scholars of the sixteenth century believed language to be: that words are essentially copies of the objects they name.[172]

  Eventually, though, the question of how language means anything became an obsession that nearly consumed the philosophical work of the twentieth century, and especially energized the field of linguistics. Over the years, linguistics experts have broken down the study of language into layers, as pictured in Figure 8-1.

  Figure 8-1. Major levels of linguistic structure, from raw spoken sounds to the complexities of meanings influenced by context[173]

  There is physical, ecological information involved in language, but only at the level of the center circle. (For writing, the equivalent is just the physical marks on a surface.) That is, we make phonetic sounds or physical marks, and those sounds and marks are physical structures, but they have meaning only because of the context in which they’re nested.

  Language has meaning not because of its phonetic physicality but because of semantic convention. Meaning emerges from densely webbed systems of communication that have grown over millennia, built up in layers like the concentric circles of this diagram. Language is challenging to study partly because we have to use language to do so; it takes practice to pull ourselves out of the immersion within language to look at it objectively and parse its layers in this way.

  Notice especially that outer layer—Pragmatics—which is the linguistic study of meaning in the context of discourse. The word “fire” literally means a number of different things, depending on where and how it is said. In the United States, there’s legal precedent constraining free public speech such that you’re not allowed to “yell fire in a crowded theater” (as the colloquial version goes), because yelling it loudly when there’s no fire can cause people to unnecessarily panic and cause injury. Ironically, many movies have people yelling “fire” in them, and it’s not a problem—same sound, same place, different context. Yelling it loudly is another factor, of course; merely whispering the word to your neighbor wouldn’t have the same effect.

  Even though all of these layers are important for making understandable environments, in design work, it’s the pragmatics of linguistic meaning that often brings the biggest challenges.

  Signs: Icons, Indexes, and Symbols

  In the fields of linguistics and semiotics, a sign is something that can be interpreted as having a meaning other than its own form. Semantic information depends on references between a thing and what that thing means. In contrast, physical information has intrinsic meaning. Stairs mean, to my body, that I can walk up them: that relationship is directly perceived. But when I say the word “stairs,” the form of the word is not the same as the object; it only refers to the object. You can’t walk up the word “stairs.”

  When we communicate with one another, we must use something other than the objects around us to make ourselves understood. Although signs exist that aren’t made by humans—for example, smoke coming from a forest is a sign that there is a fire—everything humans make to communicate meaning is a sign of one sort or another.[174]

  Generally speaking, according to linguistics, there are three modes for signification—three ways in which human expression means what it means. It’s important to note that all the signifiers in the subsections that follow work, in part, because of their dependencies on other signifiers in an object or device, with icons, indices, and symbols all in the mix. Just as our environment is nested and contextual, our language use also never works as isolated parts.

  Icons

  The signifier in an icon has some physical resemblance to its referent—it looks or behaves as portrayed by the signified. Many buildings have signage that depicts the shape of a stairway to mean there are stairs nearby, important for emergencies when the elevator isn’t working.

  Figure 8-2. The standard icon for “stairs” from the AIGA “Symbol Signs” collection[175]

  Iconic signifiers can be more or less realistically detailed. This book has a picture of a bird on the cover. That picture is an iconic reference to the type of bird—a green bee-eater. However, even a less detailed icon would work, such as a stick-figure bird, but it wouldn’t be sufficiently specific to iconically represent a particular species. Figure 8-3 demonstrates that a detailed drawing of a tree can resemble its subject down to the tiniest branch, but a simple pictograph with a green triangle and a descending brown rectangle also looks enough like a tree to be an effective iconic signifier, depending on the level of specificity required.

  Figure 8-3. A line drawing of a tree represents that object iconically,6[176] but so can a simple, abstract shape

  Indexes

  A sign that involves a direct temporal or spatial connection between signifier and signified is working as an index. An easy way to remember this one is to think of how we point at things with our index fingers. If you were to ask me where I found a pine cone, I might answer by pointing at a pine tree. My pointing at the tree is a spatial relationship between the direction of my pointing and the location of the tree. For objects small enough, we can actually pick up the object and show it; the act of showing it indicates that we are directing attention to the object. So, in answer to “which hammer did you use to repair the window?” I can grab the hammer and show it to you. In the famous World War I poster (Figure 8-4), Uncle Sam is pointing at the viewer. There are many signifiers at work in the image, but the finger pointing at the v
iewer indicates “You” as a potential recruit.

  There can be temporal indices as well, which normally involve cause-and-effect relationships. When we see smoke, it is often an indexical signifier of a related fire. When we see a footprint in mud, we can surmise that a foot was once in that spot. And automobiles have fuel gauges, such as that illustrated in Figure 8-5, directly indicating the level of fuel in the tank—the level of fuel causes the effect of a change in the needle’s position on the gauge.

  Figure 8-4. The famous World War I poster of Uncle Sam[177]

  Figure 8-5. An automobile’s fuel gauge[178]

  Like all signifiers, a fuel gauge means something because of its context. I can’t actually see the mechanism that is connecting this indicator with the level of fuel in my car’s tank; I have to interpret the connection. Also, the letters “F” and “E” are significant here because they are situated spatially along a continuum, with a needle that moves, in a car’s dashboard, and with a fuel-pump icon nested in the layout. Indexical and iconic signification both rely on some direct physical connection, either between the “pointer” and an object or between the physical form of a depiction and the physical form of what it portrays. In both of those modes, the signifier is specific to a particular signified referent. When I point at a pine tree, I’m not pointing at anything else. The fuel gauge is in a specific car, indicating a specific amount of fuel.