Understanding Context

Part VI. Composing Context

Making Room for Making Meaning

If semantic environments are the maps we live in, and they help us make sense of the other modes of information we encounter, how do we go about creating them? Is it different from the way we’re used to making applications and websites, services and strategies?

The good news is this: context isn’t made of mysterious ether; it’s a result of bodily engagement with the language and objects of an environment. In other words, context depends on stuff we can touch, create, shape, and arrange—elements that we can compose.

Part VI takes a few steps toward perspectives, principles, and techniques that can help us consider context in our design work. It discusses what composition is, and the materials we use for composing context. It also covers how users make sense of their world through narrative, and offers some considerations for how we do research, analysis, and modeling that can build on the understanding we’ve explored in prior chapters.

Figure VI.1. A modern subway map provides a composition of semantic information—an abstracted model, disconnected from the literal shape of streets above-ground; it’s an early example of infrastructure that allows people to navigate by label more than physical structures^[376]

^[376] Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Milano_Subway_map.svg