create them, too. Just as a library’s components make it possible for you to read, the components of a bank’s website or mobile application make it possible for you to do your banking. As with the library, the online bank’s cues can be designed to create a context conducive to “good banking”—and to put you in the banking mindset—whatever that means for the bank’s customers.
Thus, if we want to design information environments that truly serve our needs, we must start by understanding how context works and—more specifically—how we can use language to create particular contexts.
Information architect Andrew Hinton offered a very useful working definition of context in his book Understanding Context:
Context is an agent’s understanding of the relationships between the elements of the agent’s environment.1
In the library example, you are the agent, and the library is the environment. The elements in this environment include the bookshelves, reading tables, chairs, walls, lights, and other accoutrements that make a library a library. These elements are laid out in relation to each other in particular ways—chairs alongside tables that have lights over them, for example—in order to facilitate your use of the place as a context for effective reading.
Your understanding of the context of a library is something that you’ve acquired through previous experiences in such an environment. Babies don’t know they’re supposed to be quiet in such a place—but you do, perhaps as a result of having been reprimanded by a librarian in the past (or seeing someone else be reprimanded).
I refer to you as an agent in the environment because your presence there changes the context. For one thing, you can physically change the form of the environment by moving stuff around. (The librarian may be most displeased!) For another, your mere presence there changes the context. Consider how your experience of being in the library might be affected if you were to suddenly run into Tom Hanks there. (I had this exact experience perusing the aisles in a bookshop in Los Angeles—an encounter that immediately changed my understanding of the context I was in.)
Where Are You and What Can You Do There?
Physical environments—buildings, towns, cities, parks, etc.—are designed artifacts, but we experience these things differently than other designed artifacts, such as iPhones and coffee table books. We experience buildings as urban environments that we inhabit; we move around and inside them, and their forms determine what we can do at any given time.
As we move through an environment, our senses register sights, sounds, smells, and so on. We slowly develop an understanding of the relationship between the different spaces that make up that place. We get a sense of what we can and can’t do there. At first, we must rely on our senses and think about what we’re doing. Eventually, it becomes second nature.
If you’ve ever visited a new city, you may have had the experience of being disoriented at first. As you move around, you register particular places in the environment: this is the hotel where I’m staying, one block north is the bakery with the beautiful croissants, two blocks further is the tram station, and so on. Given enough time in the environment, you eventually build a mental representation of the place. You no longer need a physical map to know where you’re going, since you’ve created a sort of internal map of the place.2 You know where you are relative to other parts of the environment, because you’ve internalized the parts of the environment and the relationships between them. As a result, you also become more adept at making predictions about what you’re likely to find next.
You don’t come to this experience as a blank slate. Your expectations of how the place is supposed to be organized are set by your previous experiences and cultural expectations. For example, in a pedestrian-centric European city such as Lyon, you will expect a degree of density and a mix of uses (i.e., commercial and residential) that are quite different than what you’d expect in a car-centric American city such as Houston.
How do you experience a city as pedestrian-friendly? The environment in such a place offers cues that tell you what you can and can’t do there. These cues are called affordances, a concept introduced by psychologist J. J. Gibson in the 1960s.3 Gibson and his collaborator and wife Eleanor were interested in how organisms sense their environments. He coined the word affordance to describe how elements of an environment communicate the possibilities for action they afford to organisms that are capable of undertaking such actions. For example, to a being with opposable thumbs, a tree branch affords grasping.
Your relationship with your immediate environment—and how you behave in it—is determined by the affordances it provides. Pause for a moment to examine your current demeanor in the environment. You’re probably holding this book (whether paper-based or in an electronic device) while sitting in a chair or couch in a room of some sort. As an artifact, the book has certain characteristics that make it evident as to how it may be manipulated. You can pick it up, turn it around, and put it inside another object (such as a bag). The same goes for the chair: its form communicates to you that it’s ready to receive your butt. It does this by having a particular shape, a particular height, particular materials, and a particular surface treatment that make it adequate for a being such as yourself to sit on.
Imagine how different things would be if the chair’s seat were located 11 feet off the ground, or if it were covered in electrified spikes. In such cases, it would not afford “seating” to you. This is an important point: affordances are not inherent characteristics of objects. They only pertain to the relationship between an object and an agent in the environment. A chair that affords seating to you provides completely different affordances to an E. coli bacterium. To the bacterium—a microscopic organism with a completely different mechanical configuration and sensory apparatus—a chair does not afford seating.
It’s important to note that affordances don’t tell you what the book is about; they merely tell you it’s an object that you can pick up and manipulate in particular ways. The book provides much information beyond this. For example, its cover may feature its name and the name of the author prominently, a designed feature that comes in very handy when trying to select a particular book from a bookshelf. The information conveyed by the book’s cover is an example of a signifier, “some sort of indicator, some signal in the physical or social world that can be interpreted meaningfully” in Don Norman’s definition.4
When you’re walking on a sidewalk in a pedestrian-friendly city like Lyon, you perceive affordances and signifiers all around you. For example, the sidewalk itself affords you travel in particular directions at a safe distance from the large, fast-moving objects on the nearby road. The sidewalk doesn’t necessarily convey any meaning beyond “you can walk here.” There will come a point where the sidewalk ends, and you must cross a road in order to continue on your walk. The road has signals that tell the drivers of vehicles when they should stop, and tell you and your fellow pedestrians when you can walk safely across the road. These crossing signs are signifiers: they convey meaning to both drivers and pedestrians that influence their behavior in the environment.
How You Know What You Can Do There
The meaning of these signs must be learned. We aren’t born knowing that red means stop and green means go; these are social conventions we must internalize if they are to communicate their intended meaning to us. And knowing what the colors of the lights mean is not enough: we must also understand the social hierarchies and functional objectives of the environment these colors are enabling. For example, green and red lights have a different meaning on a Christmas tree than they do on a traffic light.
A useful framework for understanding how
