In the Context of Many Contexts: A Review of Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information by Andrew Hilton

Hinton, Andrew. Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, Inc., 2014. 440 pages. $49.99 (paperback). ISBN 9781449323172.

As early as 1981, media critic George W. S. Trow remarked on the proliferation of network media and communications as fabricating a social environment he characterized as a “context of no-context.”¹ With the explosion of computing, the Internet, and handheld, portable, and wearable devices, the digitized abstractions of “place,” “time (simultaneity),” and augmented “sense” are constructing a universe where “the things we build and inhabit are ‘places made of information.’”² These places continue to change at whirlwind speed. Resmini and Rosati call them “ubiquitous ecologies”³—contexts (physical, symbolic and digital) that were once comparatively bounded and now converge across media, channels, and our embodied experiences of the world.

McCullough wrote that “environment is the sum of all present contexts.”⁴ Therefore, this blending of contexts increases the “fuzziness” of distinguishable human environments. It also greatly influences what we consider literacy (or being informed) with regards to various elements of our experience. Resmini states that

the ecology, this complex, information-based, distributed beast being disseminated, split up and reconnected over an arbitrary number of different interacting channels by an ever increasing number of actors…has gone mobile and has bled into physical space. Handling complexity is now the relevant task.⁵

Within this burgeoning complexity, what it means to be knowledgeable, capable, and skillful is changing. In literacy instruction, we often say we want to develop user proficiency in navigation. What we really mean is understanding.⁶ With Understanding Context, Andrew Hinton has provided an invaluable, clear, and comprehensive resource. His book speaks to handling the complexity of our blended environment, as well as designing situations and tools that “nudge”⁷ human users toward literacy and understanding.

Hinton describes Understanding Context as an “’understanding and how it works’ book.”⁸ He recognizes the complexities that arise with the layering of our physical, semantic, and digital environments and fosters awareness by addressing

• how people understand context in any environment;
• how language takes part in that understanding; and
• how design participates in making context.⁹

The book delves broadly and deeply into seminal cross-disciplinary studies.¹⁰ Hinton uses these studies to explicate how humans evolve within, construct, engage, and thereby comprehend their environments. He crafts stable conceptual markers such as “tacit” to “explicit” knowledge¹¹ “invariant” and “variant” elements, and the “sense making” and “place making” characteristics of human meaning-making. And he describes the practice of “satisficing”¹²—how organisms satisfy the requirements of survival by conserving as much energy as possible, sufficing to accomplish acceptable outcomes. Hinton’s work successfully translates our complex experience into content we can readily understand. He does not simplify the situation but clarifies it.

Understanding Context is, after all, about how we perceive context. We must understand “the relationships between the elements of [our] environment.”¹³ We must see a “mutual, coupled dance between environment and active perception.”¹⁴ All of the contexts we participate in (physical, semantic and digital) are “nested within our environment”¹⁵ as a whole. Yet we develop technological systems that “lack contextual empathy.”¹⁶ Our digital agents cannot “rely on the most ancient and capable aptitudes of our perceptual systems.”¹⁷ Hinton diagrams how humans (embodied) and technology (pure abstractions) “learn” the world in different directions:¹⁸

¹⁹

Abstraction requires explicit (conscious, deliberate) knowledge—a much greater cognitive load than our preferred tacit (intuitive, automatic) perception. “The more of our world we encode for machines, the more of it is opaque to us, out of our reach, detached from the laws that govern the non-digital parts of our world.”²⁰ So a kind of “choreography”²¹ is needed between agents, the elements that agents design, and the elements of the environment that are already there. All professions are now immersed in this whole environment, merging complex physical, semantic, and digital contexts. To enable meaningful access, creation, analysis, action, reflection, and sharing with digital information and media, we must (1) acknowledge our native perception-action “loop of least resistance,” and (2) be attuned and committed to constructing situations that “handle this complexity”—clarifying agents, places, layouts, objects, media, and modes.

The central question for literacy work (and the central question of this book) might be “Will this environment be perceived and understood, in a real situation, with real people?”²² This alters the focus from desired outcomes and goals, discrete skills, and explicit learning to co-creating situations that clarify needs in order to locate and understand how to complete tasks. Hinton develops this as a simple model for design:

²³

He then elaborates it further in relation to digital and media literacies:

²⁴

The “ubiquitous ecologies” humans inhabit today, Hinton demonstrates, are not a “context of no-context.” They are nested as a whole complex of one blended environment variously perceived. Context produces, enables, and constrains human conduct. By nature we will navigate it through loops of perception and action, but in order to be competent in our environment, to make it usable and meaningful, we need understanding and clarity within it.

People satisfice when they browse and search—they engage whatever most immediately triggers the “scent” related to their present situation. In fact, “browse” and “search” are reified ideas that have more to do with the way the system constrains choice of action than the sorts of actions a user might take without such constraints. Everything a user does boils down to taking action in the environment, seeing what happens, and calibrating further action based on that feedback loop.… Information architectures are constructs that help people understand their own actions, situations, and needs; good information architecture helps people discover their ultimate narrative along their own, uniquely wandering path.²⁵

Understanding Context is good information architecture. It not only handles great complexity, clarifying “how it works,” it also expertly “choreographs” relationships between elements in the current environment that help each reader discover applications within his or her own field or practice. Accurately summarizing core concepts and thinkers from multiple disciplines that inform information science and technology, ethnography and education, cultural anthropology, and media studies,²⁶ and replete with visual and practical tools and examples from the networked spaces and sites most commonly utilized,²⁷ this book is a fine resource for scholars and students, information professionals, educators, and the general public. Hinton’s work is a much-needed survey and substantial treatment of the theories, practices, novel dynamics, and potential methods required for mutual thriving in our ever-emerging and often confounding environment.

Bibliography

Gibson, James J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979.

———. The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966.

Hinton, Andrew. Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, Inc., 2014.

McCullough, Malcolm. Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environmental Knowing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.

Morville, Peter. Intertwingled. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Semantic Studios, 2014.

Negroponte, N. “Beyond Digital.” Wired 6, no. 12 (December 1998). http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/6.12/negroponte.html.

Resmini, Andrea. “Information Architecture in the Age of Complexity.” Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science & Technology 39, no. 1 (October 2012): 9–13.

Resmini, Andrea, and Luca Rosati. “Information Architecture for Ubiquitous Ecologies.” In Proceedings of the International Conference on Management of Emergent Digital EcoSystems, 29:196–29:199. MEDES ’09. New York: ACM, 2009. doi:10.1145/1643823.1643859.

———. Pervasive Information Architecture: Designing Cross-Channel User Experiences. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann, 2011.

Trow, George W. S. Within the Context of No Context. Boston: Little, Brown, 1981.

———. “Within the Context of No-Context.” New Yorker. November 17, 1980. Accessed May 12, 2015. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1980/11/17/within-the-context-of-no-context.