A 10 minute version of my talk about how we are now creating context itself, and the challenges that brings. Given at WebVisions Atlanta & NYC in 2011-2012. Related blog post here: http://www.inkblurt.com/2012/01/20/the-contexts-we-make/

1. THE CONTEXT
PROBLEM
A 10 Minute ‘Punchy Idea’
WebVisions | NYC | 2012
Andrew Hinton [Macquarium]| @inkblurt
CLICK TO START

2. Where are you, right now?

3. To us in the room, you’re ‘here.’
online room
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.

4. 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’”

5. Reality hacking.
Context
“Fountain” | Marcel Duchamp ~ 1917
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?

6. flickr - uicdigital
Information changes how we experience the physical.
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.

7. flickr - aokkone
More pervasive; more immersive.
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.

8. http://www.notorietyinc.com/blog/volkswagen-x-mit-a-i-d-a-holographic-dashboard-gps-navigator-video
More pervasive; more immersive.
In fact, research is happening now to actually increase the detail & realism the information
dimension for drivers.

9. Information makes places,
kind of like this picture makes a pipe.
If you could smoke the 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.

10. 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?

11. US Constitution
Some immersive
information
frameworks
aren’t physical at all.
archives.gov
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.

12. “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.

13. “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.

14. In the information dimension,
language is architecture.
In the information dimension, language is architecture.

15. vs
flickrcom - shimonkey flickr.com - anirudhkoul
Obvious difference.
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

16. D vs @
flickrcom - shimonkey flickr.com - anirudhkoul
Not so obvious.
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

17. We’ve always lived in language.
abcdefghijklmn
opqrstuvwxyz
abcdefghijklmn
opqrstuvwxyz
Map = Territory
Now we live in software.
photo: http://cjsd.blogspot.com/2008/03/day-d20-died.html
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.

18. Existing Context
online room
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 ...

19. What we make for the “screen” changes the world “outside the screen.”
Existing Context
room
online
The Context we design.
The more we’re actually designing all human context.
>>What we make for the screen changes the world outside the screen.

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

21. We don’t fully understand
what 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.

22. So what do we do?

23. 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.

24. Task
Task Need
Cognitive
Physical
Situation
Task
Task
Need
Need
Emotional
Task Task Task
Task
“Scenario”
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.

25. Punching, complete.
[andrewhinton.com | @inkblurt]