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Take a moment to look around you now and then come back to this paragraph. While your attention is currently focused on these words, your body is located somewhere in space; maybe it’s a room in your house or a bench in a park. Your body’s relationship with these surroundings will have an important impact on your experience of reading this book. The configuration of the space you’re in is either conducive to the task of reading, or it isn’t. Is it too loud? Too cold? Is there enough light? Are there other things clamoring for your attention?

You can read more easily in a library than in a bustling nightclub. These two environments create contexts that facilitate very different goals. Your body reacts to cues in these environments in predictable ways: The library encourages you to be quiet and contemplative, a behavior that aids your comprehension of texts, while the nightclub encourages you to socialize.

If you were raised in a culture that has libraries, being in an environment that has the cues you associate with a library will influence your behavior in specific ways. For example, you know what you can expect to do there and what is expected of you as a participant in that type of environment. As designers, we can design these cues: we know some elements and forms lend themselves to reading while others lend themselves to partying.

It’s not just physical environments such as libraries and nightclubs that create contexts; information environments create them, too. Just as a library’s components make it possible for you to read, the components of a bank’s website or mobile application make it possible for you to do your banking. As with the library, the online bank’s cues can be designed to create a context conducive to “good banking”—and to put you in the banking mindset—whatever that means for the bank’s customers.

Thus, if we want to design information environments that truly serve our needs, we must start by understanding how context works and—more specifically—how we can use language to create particular contexts.

Information architect Andrew Hinton offered a very useful working definition of context in his book Understanding Context:

Context is an agent’s understanding of the relationships between the elements of the agent’s environment.¹

In the library example, you are the agent, and the library is the environment. The elements in this environment include the bookshelves, reading tables, chairs, walls, lights, and other accoutrements that make a library a library. These elements are laid out in relation to each other in particular ways—chairs alongside tables that have lights over them, for example—in order to facilitate your use of the place as a context for effective reading.

Your understanding of the context of a library is something that you’ve acquired through previous experiences in such an environment. Babies don’t know they’re supposed to be quiet in such a place—but you do, perhaps as a result of having been reprimanded by a librarian in the past (or seeing someone else be reprimanded).

I refer to you as an agent in the environment because your presence there changes the context. For one thing, you can physically change the form of the environment by moving stuff around. (The librarian may be most displeased!) For another, your mere presence there changes the context. Consider how your experience of being in the library might be affected if you were to suddenly run into Tom Hanks there. (I had this exact experience perusing the aisles in a bookshop in Los Angeles—an encounter that immediately changed my understanding of the context I was in.)