Today, many of us work with collaborators in different parts of the world, some of whom we don’t get to interact with in physical space at all. Our interactions with these people are completely mediated through screens and (less frequently) speakerphones. The way we organize our shared information environments has (at least) as big an impact in our ability to collaborate as the way we organize our physical offices.
Learning in Information
Education is also moving to information environments. At a time when the cost of traditional higher education is rising,8 MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and online learning providers such as Coursera, Udemy, and Khan Academy offer a lower-cost alternative. Major universities such as Stanford, Harvard, and MIT already offer such courses. But it’s not just higher education that is undergoing this transformation. My grade-school daughters cheerfully talk about taking assessment tests in their Chromebooks at school. And much corporate training happens in learning management systems that allow employees to learn at their own pace and their managers to track their progress.
Socializing in Information
Increasingly, we socialize and get a sense for what’s going on by interacting in information environments. Social networks such as Facebook (which as of December 2017 had 2.17 billion active monthly users), WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Twitter are where many of us catch up with our friends today. Whereas Oldenburg’s third places reinforce a sense of local community by being grounded in a particular place, digital social networks are unfettered by such constraints.9 The opinions we’re exposed to in these systems are not those of our neighbors, but those of the people whom algorithms have determined will keep us engaged. The effects on democracy of having citizens inform their world views in such environments is a topic of ongoing study. That said, I can confidently say that engaging with each other in a context where over a quarter of the world’s population is present is bound to have some effect on our ability to act collectively.
Placemaking with Information
New applications of digital technology have frequently been framed as either tools or publishing media. This is understandable, since other new technologies have often taken the form of tools, and most previous information technologies have been in service to publishing information. However, thinking about these technologies as tools or publications limits our understanding of what they do for us (and to us). They’re much more than that.
Consider one of the greatest artifacts to have emerged from the internet: Wikipedia. On one level, Wikipedia is a product: a publication. As suggested by its name, it’s modeled on traditional paper-based encyclopedias such as the Encyclopedia Britannica. However, Wikipedia differs from those old books in two main ways. First, it’s much larger than any previous encyclopedia. As of July 2017, the English version of Wikipedia had 5,435,446 articles and is growing at a rate of over 20,000 per month. To illustrate in physical terms, in 2015 the American artist Michael Mandiberg printed out the English version of Wikipedia. It took up 7,473 volumes, each 700 pages long.10 The second way in which Wikipedia differs from previous encyclopedias is related to how it got so big: Wikipedia is a “living” document that is collectively written and edited by people around the world in real-time. The very instant his printers started putting ink to paper, Mr. Mandiberg’s physical copy of Wikipedia was out-of-date.
Astonishing as these figures are, this should be familiar enough ground. After all, we are still talking about a document, even if its size and rate of change happen on a previously unimaginable scale. But on another level, Wikipedia is also the place in which this publication is written. Much as medieval scriptoria provided the ideal environment for monks to hand-copy manuscripts, Wikipedia provides the environment where a small army of mostly anonymous editors and writers can create an organic, networked, decentralized, massive text.
Wikipedia may not have a roof and walls, but it’s very much a place. It provides the structures, navigation systems, and rules of engagement that enable over 100,000 people to spend at least an hour every day working there, and for the rest of us to get delightfully lost exploring the many nooks they’ve created.11 Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, is not so much its editor-in-chief, but rather the architect of an environment that made it possible for Wikipedia to emerge from the collective efforts of a large group of globally distributed contributors, most of whom he will never meet. Much like our monumental buildings, Wikipedia-as-place is also laden with meaning as a representative artifact of a new type of culture that works, thrives, and lives in information. No physical place could do these jobs better.
For the most part, the people who design websites and apps have thought of them either primarily as products or services, not as places. While wayfinding has long been part of the digital design discussion, it’s been primarily deployed in service for facilitating access to information. With the growing pervasiveness of information systems in our daily lives, placemaking has started to emerge as a primary concern in the design of information systems. Books such as Malcolm McCullough’s Digital Ground (2004), Andrea Resmini and Luca Rosati’s Pervasive Information Architecture (2011), Martin Dade-Robertson’s The Architecture of Information (2011), and Andrew Hinton’s Understanding Context (2014) all make compelling cases for consciously crafting contexts with software.
Software-based experiences have become central to our ability to act skillfully. Thinking about them as products, publications, or services is not serving our needs well. If we are to move our shops, schools, singles bars, and third places online, it behooves us to look at how such places have accommodated our needs successfully in the past. Approaching software design as a placemaking activity—with a focus on intended outcomes and behavior rather than on forms or interactions—results in systems that can serve our needs better in the long term. In order to do so, we first need to unpack how environments affect our behavior. That will be the focus of the next chapter.
We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.
—Winston Churchill
CHAPTER
2
Context
Take a moment to look around you now and then come back to this paragraph. While your attention is currently focused on these words, your body is located somewhere in space; maybe it’s a room in your house or a bench in a park. Your body’s relationship with these surroundings will have an important impact on your experience of reading this book. The configuration of the space you’re in is either conducive to the task of reading, or it isn’t. Is it too loud? Too cold? Is there enough light? Are there other things clamoring for your attention?
You can read more easily in a library than in a bustling nightclub. These two environments create contexts that facilitate very different goals. Your body reacts to cues in these environments in predictable ways: The library encourages you to be quiet and contemplative, a behavior that aids your comprehension of texts, while the nightclub encourages you to socialize.
If you were raised in a culture that has libraries, being in an environment that has the cues you associate with a library will influence your behavior in specific ways. For example, you know what you can expect to do there and what is expected of you as a participant in that type of environment. As designers, we can design these cues: we know some elements and forms lend themselves to reading while others lend themselves to partying.
It’s
