Understanding Context

Chapter 4. Perception, Cognition, and Affordance

In the Universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between there are doors.

—WILLIAM BLAKE

Information of a Different Sort

IF WE ARE TO KNOW HOW USERS UNDERSTAND THE CONTEXT OF OBJECTS, people, and places, we need to stipulate what we mean by understand in the first place. The way people understand things is through cognition, which is the process by which we acquire knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and our senses. Cognition isn’t an abstraction. It’s bound up in the very structures of our bodies and physical surroundings.

When a spider quickly and gracefully traverses the intricacies of a web, or a bird like the green bee-eater on this book’s cover catches an insect in flight, these creatures are relying on their bodies to form a kind of coupling with their environments—a natural, intuitive dance wherein environment and creature work together as a system. These wonderfully evolved, coupled systems result in complex, advanced behavior, yet with no large brains in sight.

It turns out that we humans, who evolved on the same planet among the same essential structures as spiders and birds, also rely on this kind of body-to-environment coupling. Our most basic actions—the sort we hardly notice we do—work because our bodies are able to perceive and act among the structures of our environment with little or no thought required.

When I see users tapping and clicking pages or screens to ...