Living in Information. Jorge Arango

CHAPTER

       1

       Environments

      One Montgomery Street in San Francisco is home to a branch of the Wells Fargo bank. It’s also a time portal. When you step through its semi-circular portico, you’re transported back to 1908, the year the building opened. Designed by renowned San Francisco architect Willis Polk to be a bank, One Montgomery looks the part. Its exterior is staid sandstone punctured by a series of tall arched windows, tied together by an ornate frieze. The interior is all business—from a time when business was a less hurried, more elegant affair. While it still serves as a functional bank branch, One Montgomery is not what 21st century bank patrons expect. It’s a cathedral for business, with high, ornate ceilings, soaring marble columns, low lighting, and a hushed tone. Mary Poppins’s George Banks would feel right at home.

      One Montgomery Street in San Francisco.

      PHOTO BY BEYOND MY KEN VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, HTTPS://COMMONS.WIKIMEDIA.ORG/WIKI/FILE:2017_1_MONTGOMERY_STREET.JPG

      I toured One Montgomery in the spring of 2017 with an architectural historian who pointed out the details that made a bank in the first few decades of the 20th century. A raised central station, to allow branch managers to oversee staff. Marble cladding. Carved stone tables for customers to fill out their deposit slips, featuring built-in inkwells.

      The inkwells have long been dry, since most people don’t write with fountain pens anymore. And more often than not, they don’t “bank” in buildings such as One Montgomery. Today, most of our financial dealings—and many other activities—happen in a different type of environment, one in which we enter and leave on a whim through screens we carry around in our pockets or unfold on tables in coffee shops.

      Whether they be websites on your notebook computer, apps on your phone, or “conversations” with the “smart” cylinder on your mantelpiece, these environments are where you catch up with your friends, work, study, find a romantic partner, bank, shop, and undertake a whole host of other activities that our forebears did in physical space. Because they are composed primarily of information—words and images on screens—we refer to them as information environments.

      We know how to design and use physical banks such as One Montgomery. We’ve been using places for this and other purposes for thousands of years. The forms of buildings have evolved over that time to suit our needs. However, information environments are still new. Patterns for their effective use are only now starting to evolve. As with every new medium, we bring to information environments biases and expectations that are not inherent to them, but echoes of the past. Let’s start by looking at how we use places: parts of our physical environment that we’ve set apart for particular uses.

       Physical Environments

      What do you understand by environment? If you’re like most people, the word will evoke images of the rainforest, whales breaching the surface of the ocean, or smokestacks spewing filth into the atmosphere. In other words, ecological images. This is not surprising, since you often see environment in phrases such as “protect the environment” or “save the environment” or “environmental pollution.”

      The natural environment is certainly an example of what I mean by “environment.” However, I also mean it a bit more generally. When I say environment, I mean the “surroundings of a system or organism,” especially the aspects of those surroundings that “influence the system’s or organism’s behavior.” (This latter condition is important; you could say your surroundings include all of the solar system, but the orbit of Jupiter has very little influence on your day-to-day actions.¹)

      We exist in a physical environment. Large parts of this environment are natural and wild, untouched by human civilization. However, most of us spend our lives in physical environments that have been reconfigured by other people toward particular ends. These “artificial” physical environments—buildings, parks, streets, towns, cities, etc.—have a great influence on our behavior. They make it possible for us to collaborate with our coworkers, sleep soundly at night, or quietly read a book.

      Beyond these obvious sheltering functions, physical environments also play important psychological and cultural roles. Think of your favorite restaurant, one you return to time and again. What makes it special? Is it the taste of the food? The comfort of its chairs? The quality of service? How cheap it is? Its proximity to your home or office? The design of its architecture? Memories of good times you’ve had there? Perhaps it’s a combination of some or all of these factors. Whatever it is, there are many other environments in the world set apart for eating and drinking, but this one is special to you.

      When you inhabit such an environment, use it for its intended purpose, and interact with other people there, it becomes part of your mental model of the world. You start using it as a reference point in your own personal geography. When you are there, you feel, think, and act in ways that are particular to that environment. We call such environments places, and they are central in our lives.