Book description
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
Publisher resources
Table of contents
- Praise for Understanding Context
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- I. The Context Problem
-
II. Physical Information
-
4. Perception, Cognition, and Affordance
- Information of a Different Sort
- A Mainstream View of Cognition
- Embodied Cognition: An Alternative View
- Action and the Perceptual System
- Information Pickup
-
Affordance
- Affordance is a revolutionary idea
- Affordances are value-neutral
- Perception of affordance information comes first; our ideas about it come later
- Affordances exist in the environment whether they are perceived or not
- Affordances are there, whether they are perceived accurately or not
- Affording information is always in a context of other information
- Affordances are learned
- Directly Perceived versus Indirectly Meaningful
- Soft Assembly
- “Satisficing”
- Umwelts
- 5. Attention, Control, and Learning
- 6. The Elements of the Environment
- 7. What Humans Make
-
4. Perception, Cognition, and Affordance
- III. Semantic Information
- IV. Digital Information
- V. The Maps We Live In
- VI. Composing Context
- A. Coda
- B. About the Author
- C. Understanding Context
- Index
- About the Author
- Copyright
Product information
- Title: Understanding Context
- Author(s):
- Release date: December 2014
- Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
- ISBN: 9781449326562
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