they’ve taken no formal position on the matter one way or another.5 If I were to let Bumpkin poop in one of the yards with no signs, I could face an irate homeowner—or not. The yards with “no poop” signs on them have merely reduced my uncertainty on this matter with regard to that small part of the universe. Thus, they provide information that influences my actions when walking my dog.
It’s easy to see how signs provide information, but what about other aspects of the environment? You get lots of information from other parts of your surroundings that also influence your actions. For example, many of the forms around you have been designed to let you know how they are meant to be used. Consider how the entrance of most public buildings is carefully designed so that you can easily find it, even if you’ve never visited that particular building before.
Entrance to the High Court at Chandigarh, by Le Corbusier.
PHOTO: HTTPS://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/INFANTICIDA/6204214446
Architects highlight the point of entry to a building by recessing openings, creating deep shadows with cantilevered roofs, breaking the rhythms of the facade, or changing the roofline, among other techniques. Even though these aren’t literal signs in the same way that the “no poop” signs are, they’re visual cues that tell you something is happening at that point in the structure. They help reduce your uncertainty, and hence improve your ability to act. They provide information.
Information Environments
You may be wondering: If information is present everywhere around us, why make the distinction between physical and information environments?
Over the course of our history, our species has produced technologies that have improved our ability to communicate, store, and process information. The first—and still most important—of these is language, at first spoken and eventually written. Language allowed us to inform one another over space and time. You needn’t have been born in Rome around 60 BCE to benefit from Lucretius’s wisdom; written language allows the information he compiled to bridge the gap between your two lifetimes.
Over time, these information technologies have become better, faster, cheaper, and more ubiquitous. Paper scrolls were an improvement over clay tablets, codices an improvement over scrolls, printed books over manuscripts, and so on. Eventually, the telegraph allowed us to tap electricity to transmit information instantaneously over long distances. This enabled people to communicate in (almost) real time while being in different physical places. The telegraph was followed by a series of ever-more-powerful information technologies: wireless radio, the telephone, and television, to name the most important.
Then, in the middle of the 20th century, a new information technology came along that would change everything: digital computers. Born of war, computers were initially conceived as super-powerful calculators to guide missiles. However, it soon became apparent that they could help us with all sorts of tasks that could be represented symbolically—even those that didn’t specifically deal with numbers.
Over the last five decades of the 20th century, computers became ever smaller, cheaper, and more powerful, and were eventually connected into a vast network that amplified their usefulness and power in previously unimagined ways. This computer network—the internet—has become central to our lives. We depend on it for all sorts of tasks, from keeping in touch with our loved ones to shopping to working to finding a mate. Some of us even wear internet-connected computers on our bodies, where they track our activities and occasionally prompt us to exercise.
Consider what happens when you chat with a friend using an app such as Apple Messages in one of these internet-connected devices. You and your friend are communicating in real time, even though your bodies may be physically very far from each other. While you’re chatting, neither of you are focused on your physical surroundings. Instead, your minds are operating within a context that’s defined by the chat app; the two of you are represented in the space as little images within circles, your words conveyed by speech bubbles, much like cartoon characters.
The chat application becomes your shared environment, its boundaries defined by the app’s user interface much as the boundaries of a physical room are defined by its walls and ceiling. You and your friend are sharing this environment, even though you’re not physically in the same place. This environment is made almost entirely of information; you can’t eat or sleep or exercise there. (But you can find out where you’re going to eat, how deeply you’ve slept, and how much you’ve exercised.) Hence, while you’re chatting, the two of you are inhabiting a shared information environment.
Physical environments are not all the same. A conversation held in a confessional in a church has a very different character than one held in a beauty shop or coffee house. The same is true of information environments; a conversation that happens in Apple Messages (where you’re afforded some degree of privacy) will have a different character than one held over Twitter, which is more public. Information environments create contexts that influence our behavior and actions.
The writer and designer Edwin Schlossberg said, “The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.”6 I think the skill of designing—especially designing software—is creating contexts in which other people can work, learn, play, organize, bank, shop, gossip, and find great gelato. We’re in the process of moving many of these activities, which we have heretofore realized in physical environments, online. The impacts of this transition on important aspects of our lives—how we shop, work, learn, and more—are worth considering. Let’s look at some now.
Shopping in Information
Consider the phenomenon that is being called “The Great Retail Apocalypse of 2017”: a massive closure of physical retail shops in the U.S. Over 4,000 locations were affected, with some retailers such as Payless Shoe Source, Sports Authority, RadioShack, The Limited, and Wet Seal declaring bankruptcy. Major players, such as JCPenney, Sears, and Macy’s have closed over 100 stores each, with the latter eliminating 10,000 jobs as a result. According to an article in The Atlantic,7 the simplest explanation is the rise of online retailing, particularly through Amazon.com, whose sales in the North American market quintupled from $16 billion in 2010 to $80 billion in 2016. Shopping has always been grounded in information. The buyer who has less information about prices than the seller is at a disadvantage. Information environments such as Amazon do a better job than physical shops as settings for the sort of information arbitrage that happens in a commercial transaction. When you shop for something in Amazon, you are a much better informed—and therefore, more powerful—purchaser than if you shop in a physical store. The economies of scale that come from serving a larger customer base lead to lower prices. Since the system is freed from the constraints imposed by physical stores, it can offer much more diverse inventory. And because the environment is made of information, it can reconfigure itself dynamically to make the relevant parts of this inventory more easily available to each individual customer. The combination of these factors is difficult for physical retail stores to compete with.
Working in Information
Much of our work, too, is increasingly happening in information environments. Many white-collar jobs require that people spend significant amounts of their time focused on their computers and phones, interacting with each other through information environments such as Slack, Outlook,
