Context Design (beta) CHI Atlanta Nov 2012

CONTEXT DESIGN
INFORMATION AS ARCHITECTURE — beta

Presented to CHI Atlanta | November 2012

Andrew Hinton The Understanding Group
@inkblurt @undrstndng

Thursday, November 29, 12

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!)

Andrew Hinton | @inkblurt


Part of where my obsession started

What do we mean by “Information
Environment”??



Context awareness & management in G+



Context can make Twitter a fundamentally difference experience.

Desktop App
- Linear column
- Serial feed
- Narrow aperture
Website - Peripheral attention
- Full view
- Center of attention
- Twitter controls architecture
iconfactory.com

Tweetdeck:
- Multi-column tweetdeck.com
- Filtered
- Parallel feed
- Very wide aperture
- Central attention
SMS:
- Single-message
RSS Embed:
- No “feed”
- Decontextualized
- Tiny aperture
from Twitter apps or
- Interruptive / alert
site



A street in Dublin: digital signage is spawning everywhere



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



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

Situation

Agent Understand Subject



Situation

Agent Understand Subject



Situation(s)

Subject Subject Subject
Subject
Agent/
Subject Subject Subject
Understand???
Subject
Subject
Subject



Contextual Understanding involves
Perception of
& Cognition about
Information



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



THE
GREAT
CHAIN
OF
BEING


“COGITO
ERGO
SUM” *

* “At least, that’s what I think.”



Embodied Cognition



Weather Vane & Watt Steam Governor

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



Every use case mapped
out for an artificial
brain.

Supposedly made in
our image.

ASIMO

@inkblurt


Can’t handle all the
possible edge cases.

@inkblurt


Use cases not mapped out.

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

(The “brain” mainly manages sensors.)

“Big Dog”

@inkblurt


You can’t even kick
this thing over.

@inkblurt


Sigmund

@inkblurt


“Berrypicking”

Marcia Bates

Directed Searching ± 1%

Passive Awareness ± 80%

Borrowed from Pervasive Information
Architecture, Resmini & Rosati

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



BEHAVIOR IS ORGANIC


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.



Lakoff / Johnson - Embodied Language

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



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



Contextual clarity requires structure.

“One morning I shot

an elephant in my

pajamas. How he got

into my pajamas I’ll

never know.”



James J Gibson - Ecological Psychology



A few key ideas from Gibson on perception

• 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.”



More Gibson ...

Information Pickup Theory

Andrew Hinton | @inkblurt 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.



Modes of “Information”

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

Ecological

Encoding of language &
logic so machines can
Semantic Digital efficiently & accurately
Additional information transmit inputs &
“picked up” from the layer of outputs.
language humans have added
to the environment.

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?

Very little
semantic or
ecological
information
about what
context I’m in

Ecological
Information /
Affordance
for action.



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



ONTOLOGY

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



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

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

Andy Clark; Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension
http://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 ... )



Thank You.



Context Design (beta) CHI Atlanta Nov 2012

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