THE CONTEXT PROBLEM

A 10 Minute ‘Punchy Idea’

WebVisions | NYC | 2012Andrew Hinton [Macquarium]| @inkblurt

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Where are you, right now?

roomonline

To us in the room, you’re ‘here.’

To people online, you’re ‘here.’

So where are you right now? just think about that a second. >>To those of us in the room we look over and see you’re here. With us in the room. >>But on Twitter, or instant messenger, or facebook -- wherever else you’re communicating at the moment -- you’re “there”

This isn’t just an idle thought. These words matter because they indicate the way we cognitively comprehend reality.

Where is “here” in this tweet?

Check out this tweet ... “I’m here. Is anybody here?”How do you interpret this question? Where is “here” here? She could have arrived at a restaurant and is asking if her friends are there yet. Or she could be asking if anyone she knows is looking at Twitter at the moment. Notice I referred to even the statement as “here” -- as if it’s a place. “Let’s look at what this person is saying ‘here’”

Reality hacking.

“Fountain” | Marcel Duchamp ~ 1917

Context

Recognize this? >> This was named by art experts as the most influential work of art of the 20th century. Not because of its beauty, but because it signaled & partly catalyzed a rift in how we think about culture. Duchamp and friends grabbed a urinal and signed it with a fake artist’s name, and entered it in an art show. It didn’t get in -- but then they publicized the “injustice” of being rejected so widely it became famous, and started conversations about what the nature of art really is. Who decides it? >> And it was all done by adding a bit of language to an object. By changing its context. >> It’s a sort of reality hacking. Why?

Information changes how we experience the physical.

flickr - uicdigital

Because information changes how we experience the physical world. Look at this photo -- there’s information everywhere in this scene. >>The lines on the road tell us where to drive; the traffic light is a virtual barrier that affects our behavior; the road signs give us a layer of instruction that adds meaning to the city around us. without the information here, it would quite literally be a different place.

More pervasive; more immersive.

flickr - aokkone

Now look at today. When you’re using a GPS, where are you driving? Your brain merges the information from the device with what you’re seeing in the windshield. They become essentially the same. So now we’re in even richer information environments.

More pervasive; more immersive.

http://www.notorietyinc.com/blog/volkswagen-x-mit-a-i-d-a-holographic-dashboard-gps-navigator-video

In fact, research is happening now to actually increase the detail & realism the information dimension for drivers.

If you could smoke the pipe.

Information makes places, kind of like this picture makes a pipe.

This is the famous Magritte painting -- it says “this is not a pipe”The picture definitely shows a pipe but it’s not a real pipe you can smoke. >>Information is kind of like this in the way it makes places. >>Except for a key difference that, with Information, you can smoke the pipe.

photo: http://cjsd.blogspot.com/2008/03/day-d20-died.html

Recognize this? It’s a home-made dungeon for Dungeons & Dragons. This is an information environment -- but it’s only barely part of the physical world. It’s all just information. But we experienced it as feeling very real, with real consequences and meaning with our peers. Ok whatever -- that’s D&D. Can’t take that seriously right?

Some immersive information frameworks

aren’t physical at all. archives.gov

US Constitution

What about this? How is this all that different from a D&D ruleset? Some people got together and wrote an information artifact, just words on pages, but it’s the framework the United States has existed within for over 2 centuries. Information is real, and it creates contexts that can have powerful effects on the reality we live in.

“Beacon” “Buzz”

Which is why people get so upset when some of the places they live in suddenly change their rules. Without representation, without explanation. What did these two platforms get so wrong? They assumed that, just because the environments they created were digital -- informational -- the rules of physical social context didn’t apply. They oversimplified or ignored some very complex things about how people really live. They treated these designs as software engineering solutions, rather than life solutions.

“Friend?”

For example, they warped what the word ‘friend’ means. Sure, it’s just language. But used as an entity in a relational database, behind a massive platform where millions of people conduct big, meaningful slices of their lives ... it becomes more than just a word. It becomes architecture.

In the information dimension, language is architecture.

In the information dimension, language is architecture.

Obvious difference.

flickrcom - shimonkey

vs

flickr.com - anirudhkoul

For example, in physical space, there’s an obvious difference between a little nook in the corner of a room where you can whisper to someone, and a stage in front of thousands of people where a microphone will announce what you say to all of them.

Whisper image CC http://flickr.com/photos/shimonkey/447924817/Crowd image CC http://flickr.com/photos/anirudhkoul/2046282436/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

Not so obvious.

flickrcom - shimonkey

vs

flickr.com - anirudhkoul

D @

But on Twitter, all it takes is D vs @ to make that difference. It changes from requiring a big, physical change to a tiny alphanumeric slip. The information environments we’re creating are littered with these dangerously thin barriers between contexts. Whisper image CC http://flickr.com/photos/shimonkey/447924817/Crowd image CC http://flickr.com/photos/anirudhkoul/2046282436/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

photo: http://cjsd.blogspot.com/2008/03/day-d20-died.html

Map = Territory

Now we live in software.

We’ve always lived in language.

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

We’ve always lived in language -- since the earliest beginnings of civilization, it’s been part of what makes us people. >> But now we also live in software, which is language made into architecture. Places we inhabit. >> The map has become the territory. So, in a weird way, the D&D geeks won ... we all live in their dungeons now.

roomonline

Existing Context

The Context we design.

We aren’t just designing for existing contexts anymore. We are designing the context itself. And the more that information dimension pervades our physical space ...

roomonline

Existing Context

The Context we design.

What we make for the “screen” changes the world “outside the screen.”

The more we’re actually designing all human context. >>What we make for the screen changes the world outside the screen.

Actually, we’re turning the world into the “screen.”

Actually, we’re turning the world into the screen.

We don’t fully understandwhat we have wrought.

I don’t think we really understand what we have made. We keep going as if everything we do with this technology just has to be great, but we end up making mistakes and wondering how we screwed up.

So what do we do?

Be aware of, and understand, the problem.

The first step is just to be aware of the problem. I think this is an area of design that we haven’t fully come to grips with yet. So let’s keep working on that.

Situation

Need

Need

Need

TaskTask

Task

Task Task

Task

Task

Task

“Scenario”

Cognitive

Emotional

Physical

It all comes back to understanding the whole person, and the whole contextual situation in which they live and where their needs come from. >>We have to be careful that we’re not so focused on the individual task we’re designing for ...>> That we ignore the incredible ripple effect it has, and how it alters the reality that person is living in.

Punching, complete.

[andrewhinton.com | @inkblurt]