Table of Contents
Praise for Understanding Context;
Foreword;
Preface;
The Practical Bit;
Who Should Read This Book?;
So This Book Teaches Methods for Designing Context?;
Why Information Architecture?;
What Will You Learn from This Book?;
A Tour Through the Book’s Six Parts;
The Personal Bit;
Acknowledgments;
The Context Problem;
Chapter 1: Everything, Yet Something;
1.1 Birds in Trees, Words in Books;
1.2 Scenario: Andrew Goes to the Airport;
1.3 Breaking It Down;
Chapter 2: A Growing Challenge;
2.1 Early Disruptions;
2.2 The Role of the Web;
2.3 Case Study: Facebook Beacon;
Chapter 3: Environments, Elements, and Information;
3.1 A Wall and a Field;
3.2 A Conventional Definition of Context;
3.3 A New, Working Definition of Context;
3.4 Modes of Information;
3.5 Starting from the Bottom;
Physical Information;
Chapter 4: Perception, Cognition, and Affordance;
4.1 Information of a Different Sort;
4.2 A Mainstream View of Cognition;
4.3 Embodied Cognition: An Alternative View;
4.4 Action and the Perceptual System;
4.5 Information Pickup;
4.6 Affordance;
4.7 Directly Perceived versus Indirectly Meaningful;
4.8 Soft Assembly;
4.9 “Satisficing”;
4.10 Umwelts;
Chapter 5: Attention, Control, and Learning;
5.1 A Spectrum of Conscious Attention;
5.2 Environmental Control;
5.3 Memory, and Learning the Environment;
5.4 What Does All This Mean for Design?;
Chapter 6: The Elements of the Environment;
6.1 Invariants;
6.2 The Principle of Nesting;
6.3 Surface, Substance, Medium;
6.4 Objects;
6.5 Layout;
6.6 Events;
6.7 Place;
Chapter 7: What Humans Make;
7.1 The Built Environment;
7.2 The Social Environment;
7.3 Meaning, Culture, and “Product”;
Semantic Information;
Chapter 8: How Language Works;
8.1 Looking at Language;
8.2 Signs: Icons, Indexes, and Symbols;
8.3 The Superpowers of Symbols;
8.4 Signification Conflation;
8.5 Language Is Contextual;
Chapter 9: Language as Infrastructure;
9.1 Language and the Body;
9.2 Structure of Speech;
9.3 The Role of Metaphor;
9.4 Visual Information;
9.5 Semantic Function;
9.6 Tools for Understanding;
9.7 Semantic Architecture;
Chapter 10: The Written Word;
10.1 The Origins of Writing;
10.2 What Writing Does;
10.3 The Structure of Writing;
10.4 Rules and Systems;
Chapter 11: Making Things Make Sense;
11.1 Language and “Sensemaking”;
11.2 Physical and Semantic Intersections;
11.3 Physical and Semantic Confusion;
11.4 Ducks, Rabbits, and Calendars;
Digital Information;
Chapter 12: Digital Cognition and Agency;
12.1 Shannon’s Logic;
12.2 Digital Learning and Agency;
12.3 Everyday Digital Agents;
12.4 Ontologies;
Chapter 13: Digital Interaction;
13.1 Interfaces and Humans;
13.2 Semantic Function of Simulated Objects;
13.3 Modes and Meaning;
Chapter 14: Digital Environment;
14.1 Variant Modes and Digital Places;
14.2 Foraging for Information;
14.3 Inhabiting Two Worlds at Once;
14.4 Ambient Agents;
The Maps We Live In;
Chapter 15: Information as Architecture;
15.1 Contemplating “Cyberspace”;
15.2 Architecture + Information;
15.3 Expansive IA;
15.4 About Definitions;
Chapter 16: Mapping and Placemaking;
16.1 Maps and Territory;
16.2 What Makes Places;
16.3 Railroads, Chickens, and Captain Vancouver;
16.4 Organizational Maps;
Chapter 17: Virtual and Ambient Places;
17.1 Of Dungeons and Quakes;
17.2 The Porous Nature of Cyberplaces;
17.3 Augmented and Blended Places;
17.4 The Map That Makes Itself;
17.5 Metamaps and Compasses;
Chapter 18: The Social Map;
18.1 Conversation;
18.2 Social Architectures;
18.3 “Proxemics” as a Structural Model;
18.4 Identity;
18.5 Collisions and Fronts;
18.6 The Ontology of Self;
18.7 Networked Publics;
Composing Context;
Chapter 19: Arrangement and Substance;
19.1 Composition in Other Disciplines;
19.2 Qualities of Composition;
19.3 Something to Walk On;
Chapter 20: The Materials of Semantic Function;
20.1 Elements;
20.2 Labels and Ontology;
20.3 Relationships and Taxonomy;
20.4 Rules and Choreography;
20.5 The Organization as Medium;
Chapter 21: Narratives and Situations;
21.1 People Make Sense Through Stories;
21.2 Intentions and Intersections;
21.3 The Tales Organizations Tell;
21.4 Situations over Goals;
Chapter 22: Models and Making;
22.1 A Fresh Look at Our Methods;
22.2 Observing Context;
22.3 Perspectives and Journeys;
22.4 Structures for Tacit Satisficing;
22.5 Blueprints, Floor Plans, Bubbles, and Blobs;
Coda;
About the Author;
Understanding Context;