Skip to Main Content
Understanding Context
book

Understanding Context

by Andrew Hinton
December 2014
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
464 pages
12h 6m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from 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 ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Storytelling with You

Storytelling with You

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
Understanding Your Users, 2nd Edition

Understanding Your Users, 2nd Edition

Kathy Baxter, Catherine Courage, Kelly Caine

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449326531Errata Page