These building-like metaphors have a long history online. LambdaMOO had “rooms” in which people could congregate, create objects, and collaborate. Since the beginnings of the Internet there have been applications with which people can visit digital places, such as IRC, Listservs, and UseNet. But in the mobile smartphone space, this attention to persistently shared, private placemaking is a more recent development.
Figure 17-6 presents another example of private placemaking called Avocado, a smartphone app that creates a special place for a couple to share messages, photos, lists, and a calendar.
The couple shares the same password for the app: even though it’s just a string of characters, a password is a significant semantic object that represents intimacy, similar to sharing keys to one’s home. (In fact, research shows that passwords are generally becoming tokens for intimacy, especially among young people.)[325] There’s a strong sense of connection that comes with that one bit of structural design. Other embodied architectural features of Avocado include the following:
Interactions go beyond just pictures and words by directing users to perform bodily behaviors for some messages: kissing the screen for a kiss, or pressing the phone to one’s chest to send a “hug.”
The “settings” and “profile info” of the app are about the couple, not just the one user; this further establishes the place as a shared one, equally owned by both users, even though it has instances appearing on separate devices.
Even though you can log in to the service’s website and use all the functions there, it’s really optimized for the phone, which we treat more intimately as extensions of ourselves than desktop or laptop computers.
Figure 17-6. The architecture of the app has design choices that shape the nature of the place it instantiates[326]
According to its creators, “The move to more intimate applications is only natural, as maturing platforms like Facebook and Twitter lack functionality to provide real private sharing.”[327] It’s an interesting statement, given that both Facebook and Twitter provide mechanisms for making part or all of one’s profile private; but the simplicity of having one app that equals one place, without any confusing privacy settings to configure your own structures, is part of the merit of the Avocado experience. Yet, even as privately constructed as Avocado is, it’s still created to be a supplemental extension of a nondigital relationship. Shopping lists, calendars, and other shared tools are not about your “Avocado Life,” but your “Real Life.”
In addition to supplementing our friends-and-family life, digital places also augment our civic life. In the United States, controversy swirled over the launch of the website Healthcare.gov—the primary vehicle for connecting United States citizens with the services provided under the new healthcare legislation known as the Affordable Care Act. Upon launch, what many people discovered was a broken system that couldn’t accommodate their needs, as illustrated in Figure 17-7. It was not just because of system overload, though; it was because the backend infrastructure and business rules driving it hadn’t been sorted out yet.
Figure 17-7. What millions of users saw when the ACA national website launched
Eventually, the problems were fixed, but the faulty launch highlighted a watershed moment in American civic life: it was the first time a government program of that massive scale relied almost exclusively on a digitally rendered place—the website—as the infrastructure for implementing sweeping legislative change. Even if citizens called by phone, representatives relied on the same site infrastructure. It wasn’t an interstate system, made of concrete and steel; it wasn’t hundreds of ACA offices established in federal buildings across the country; it was a website that the government required people to “go to” in order to access the service.
Digital places are part of our entire environment, including core civil infrastructures, such as healthcare, which accounts for almost a fifth of gross domestic product (GDP)[328] in the United States. They are nested among and within one another in ways both overt and hidden. The launch of the ACA site has to do with context at a national scale—defining the kind of place in which a country’s citizens live.
When we look at these examples closely, we realize that they are all actually language in various forms—semantic information, enabled by digital technology, resulting in new objects and places in our environment. We need them to behave in ways that make sense—which means they need to “make place” in a sensible way.
Vacancy at the Luna Blue
The physical reality of a place is hard to separate from the language we use to talk about it; and when that language is turned into the machinery of software and networked systems, it can have a transformative effect on the “real” place. In a multiplayer game, a database error only interrupts the fun. However, when we depend on massively multiuser environments for real-life commerce, a bug can have more dire consequences. The Internet is, in essence, a massively multiuser environment, with many structures and rulesets establishing objects, places, and digital agents. Basically, we all live in a giant MUD together now.
Consider the Luna Blue Hotel: an 18-room facility on the Mexican coast, near the island of Cozumel. As a friendly, family-owned hotel with a great reputation, the proprietors of the Luna Blue were dismayed to discover that Expedia—a large gorilla in the travel-services jungle—was showing their hotel with “No Vacancy” even though they had plenty of rooms.[329]
Because Expedia is such a huge player in the travel space, the no-vacancy status spread all over the Web to other sites where people discuss or research where to stay when traveling to the area. These other sites included big travel services affiliated with Expedia, such as TripAdvisor (Figure 17-8) and Hotels. com—all of which eventually showed up as metadata in Google search results. A single error had a domino effect of erasing the hotel’s availability from the layer of reality that mattered to it most. The ongoing saga went viral on Reddit and other sites, but Expedia’s information about (and treatment of) the hotel only got worse over time, according to the hotel’s owners.[330]
Figure 17-8. The Luna Blue, as shown via the TripAdvisor mobile website
Places are what they are due to all sorts of contextual information. In this case, an actual, physical place—with buildings, and tiki torches, and everything—was contextually compromised because the semantic map of the Web became distorted. This is just one example of how physical context can be usurped almost entirely by semantic context, when digital-information systems create such pervasive, global structures that make the semantic information the “reality of record.”
The architectural issues here go far beyond the structure of a single web-site. They arise from the relationship between the backend systems and databases, the business rules instantiated in those systems, and how all that hidden, digital logic ends up being displayed in the language that’s wrapped around a specific, physical place, like the Luna Blue. It calls into question the ontology of “Vacancy” as defined in who knows how many black boxes strung across the Web.
Information architecture can’t concern itself with only the surface labeling within a particular context—it has to consider the cross-contextual meaning of such a label, and what rules behind the scenes might change what the label signifies. The word “vacancy” stands in for an immensely complex system of logistics and commercial logic. The business rules and technological underpinnings that drive the appearance of that label have to be part of an information architecture practitioner’s consideration.
Augmented and Blended Places
Even though we experience them as immersive places, digital environments are still nested within our physical environment. Smart homes, RFID-tagged retail merchandise, mobile airport check-ins, GPS-enhanced cars, and even roadways bristling with digital signs and billboards mean that semantic information is now dynamically and actively engaged in our entire environment, not just static marks on surfaces.
Just as our smartphones are making us “cyborgs,” any physical place is pote
ntially also a “cyberplace,” shaped by the maps of information we engage through the digital systems pervading our surroundings—the digital agency of the objects and surfaces that make up the Internet of Things.
Back in 2007, I took my daughter, Madeline, to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City (see Figure 17-9 and Figure 17-10). One of the most fascinating exhibits was the Hall of Biodiversity, where a huge wall has thousands of species arranged in a sort of taxonomy of taxidermy. Oddly, though, they don’t have labels. Instead, maps and digital interfaces supply the semantic scaffolding for understanding the exhibit.
Figure 17-9. The Hall of Biodiversity at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City[331]
The Hall has a row of kiosks with which visitors can navigate rich information about the creatures mounted above. Carefully designed displays of printed taxonomical hierarchies blend with digital displays of narrative content and the sensory flood of wildlife.
This carefully orchestrated information environment relies on the cognitive abilities of visitors—the perception-action looping and language interpretation that happens simultaneously among physical and semantic information modes. The “glue” that pulls it all together is enabled by the digital information that drives the interactive interfaces. Keep in mind that the museum is a controlled environment, where the entire structure is created for a singular purpose. Architecture, interior design, and exhibit design can work together to establish a bubble-world in which everything integrates coherently. That’s different from most of the world; the uncontrolled, uncurated one where we are expected to design and launch products and services.
Figure 17-10. My daughter, Madeline, learning about natural history through cross-media interaction, on our trip in 2007
In the wild of noncurated places, there can still be fascinating transformations. Supermarket company Tesco created a similar wall-of-objects, which you can see in Figure 17-11, but in this case, the objects are two-dimensional simulations—wall-sized posters that look like store shelves full of products. Each product has a QR code customers can scan with their phones, purchase from an app, and then have delivered to their doors after they’ve arrived home.
This environmental innovation takes advantage of a real, contextual insight—subway passengers have to stand and wait for trains, and they are often in a hurry to get to or from home. In addition, they need to remember a list of things they should get at the store rattling around in their heads. Cleverly, these simulated store shelves take the context of customer behavior into account, bringing the store to the customer. This novel idea reportedly increased sales for Tesco’s Home Plus brand by 130 percent.[332]
Figure 17-11. Shoppers scan simulated products for home delivery, while waiting for the subway[333]
Unlike the museum example, this is not a fully curated, choreographed environment. Yet it transforms one context into being another at the same time.
And the displays adroitly take advantage of the new objects now part of the environment: smartphones and persistently available mobile network access. It’s the nesting of the posters within those other environmental invariants that make them what they are. Otherwise, they’d just be pictures of dish soap and soft drinks.
Both the Tesco and the museum examples offer places that immerse us in contextual layers, with physical and simulated-physical information. They use whatever manner of technology, language, and layout available to them, to more fully engage us in an experience, nudging us to act in ways that merely reading about sea life or grocery products would not.
In a sense, the smartphone potentially turns any environment into a richly interactive, semantically layered place. For example, take the relationship between restaurants and Yelp (Figure 17-12), the social reviewing platform that augments our understanding of the places of business in our environment.
Figure 17-12. Yelp’s search-results view, showing summary contextual information about restaurants in Ann Arbor, MI
Because Yelp provides ready contextual information for independent restaurants as well as chains, the reputation-information playing field is being leveled. Wherever Yelp is in heavy use, national-chain restaurant popularity has decreased, yielding ground to local, independent restaurants. Additionally, a one-star increase in an independent’s rating affects its revenue positively up to 9 percent—a benefit that the chain restaurants don’t experience.[334] Adding a digital-powered semantic-information dimension to the environment shifts the entire marketplace of restaurant-going.
Retail businesses are also taking advantage of the mobile viewport to the information dimension. Wegmans, a regional chain of upscale supermarkets, has a mobile application that shoppers can use to read Yelp-like reviews of products as well as assist in finding a product’s aisle location in a specific store, as demonstrated in Figure 17-13.
This feature might not seem all that advanced, but it takes enormous coordination of a retailer’s infrastructure to accomplish this trick. The Wegmans app also includes other capabilities, including an extensive recipe database and a shopping list feature. It’s a great example of how a retailer is adapting to new expectations by providing tools that address the situational context of grocery shopping, not just the groceries alone.
There have been recent forays into literally merging the digital dimension with the physical. Yelp was also one of the first consumer mobile apps to add augmented reality (AR) to its platform in a feature it calls “Monacle.” As Figure 17-14 illustrates, with Monacle, Yelp uses the phone’s camera, GPS, and motion sensors to show a layer of review information over the screen’s live, digital picture of the physical environment.
The AR capability certainly provides a captivating level of blended information. But, as is the case with the virtual-reality version of cyberspace, we find that this layering effect is more of an edge case. Simply reading the reviews in their regular, non-AR format is satisficing enough for most of our needs.
Figure 17-13. The Wegmans app shows the Aisle/Location of a specific product within your current store as well as product reviews
Figure 17-14. Yelp’s Monacle feature, layering thumbnail review information over the surrounding street
Google Glass (see Figure 17-15), the search giant’s well-hyped “wearable” device, is essentially a way to provide AR all the time, without having to hold a smartphone up to our faces.
Glass has been controversial for a number of reasons, one of which has to do with privacy. Because it can record pictures, video, and audio, it raises questions about whether the device too easily breaches the walls that we assume exist in social life. It’s not the ability to record that sparks the concern, but the fact that Glass is meant to be worn continually like regular glasses and can be activated without the physical cues we’re used to seeing when someone is about to take a photo or make a video with a conventional device or smartphone. The invariant events we count on to signify the act of recording are dissolving into the hidden subtleties of digital agency.
Figure 17-15. One feature of Google Glass is an AR function, layering the view with supplemental information[335]
The capability of Glass to “read” everyday gestures as triggers highlights how context can be several things at once—a coy one-eyed blink at someone across a room can also be a shutter-button press. In linguistics terms, a signifier intended to signify X is interpreted by another interpreter to signify Y instead. A speck of dust in the wearer’s eye can trigger the digital agent without the unwitting wearer’s consent—physical affordances interpreted as semantic function by digitally influenced devices.
This is not unlike the hidden rules that caused controversy with Facebook Beacon, whereby a common action (a purchase on a separate website) could be recorded and turned into information of another sort, and unwittingly broadcast to one’s “friends.” Except, when it comes to Glass and other trigger-sensing objects, the boundary crossed isn’t just between websites, but between the dimensions of our physical surroundings.
What this means for information architecture: the semantic functions we use to design information environments are no longer just hyperlinks contained in screens. They can now involve any action that users might take in any place they inhabit. It’s an important overlap between interaction design and information architecture—where object-level interaction has potentially massive ripple effects across oceans of semantically stitched systems. Like Peter Morville tells us in Ambient Findability (O’Reilly), “(T)he proving grounds have shifted from natural and built environments to the noosphere, a world defined by symbols and semantics.”[336] Language is the material for building what we need to make sense of our new environs.
The implications of how those interactions are nested in the environment—how they create cross-contextual systems of places, objects, and events—is an architectural concern. That is, it’s akin to Wurman’s mission for information architecture: “the creating of systemic, structural, and orderly principles to make something work.”[337] Whether it’s a pair of science-fiction eyeglasses, a living room gaming system’s gesture-sensing interface, or a grocery store’s geolocation feature, all these technologies are changing what it means to use information to make places, and the systems that make up our shared environment. In aggregate, they fundamentally reshape how our environment works.
The Map That Makes Itself
Understanding Context Page 30