Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

To make sense of the world, we’re always trying to place things in context, whether our environment is physical, cultural, or something else altogether. Now that we live among digital, always-networked products, apps, and places, context is more complicated than ever–starting with “where” and “who” we are.
This practical, insightful book provides a powerful toolset to help information architects, UX professionals, and web and app designers understand and solve the many challenges of contextual ambiguity in the products and services they create. You’ll discover not only how to design for a given context, but also how design participates in making context.

• Learn how people perceive context when touching and navigating digital environments
• See how labels, relationships, and rules work as building blocks for context
• Find out how to make better sense of cross-channel, multi-device products or services
• Discover how language creates infrastructure in organizations, software, and the Internet of Things
• Learn models for figuring out the contextual angles of any user experience

Table of Contents

PART I THE CONTEXT PROBLEM
Chapter 1 Everything, Yet Something
Chapter 2 A Growing Challenge
Chapter 3 Environments, Elements, and Information

PART II PHYSICAL INFORMATION
Chapter 4 Perception, Cognition, and Affordance
Chapter 5 Attention, Control, and Learning
Chapter 6 The Elements of the Environment
Chapter 7 What Humans Make

PART III SEMANTIC INFORMATION
Chapter 8 How Language Works
Chapter 9 Language as Infrastructure
Chapter 10 The Written Word
Chapter 11 Making Things Make Sense

PART IV DIGITAL INFORMATION
Chapter 12 Digital Cognition and Agency
Chapter 13 Digital Interaction
Chapter 14 Digital Environment

PART V THE MAPS WE LIVE IN
Chapter 15 Information as Architecture
Chapter 16 Mapping and Placemaking
Chapter 17 Virtual and Ambient Places
Chapter 18 The Social Map

PART VI COMPOSING CONTEXT
Chapter 19 Arrangement and Substance
Chapter 20 The Materials of Semantic Function
Chapter 21 Narratives and Situations
Chapter 22 Models and Making