Читать книгу Living in Information - Jorge Arango - Страница 21

Let’s stop again for another moment. Focus your attention on your surroundings and then come back to this paragraph. Hopefully by now it’s clear how the environment you’re in creates a context that is conducive to your activity of reading. (Or perhaps it doesn’t—in either case, you’re part of a context that is affecting your behavior.)

While you don’t experience them as physical places, websites and apps are also environments. The user interface of a word processor creates a context that affects how you think about what you can do within it, much as a church or a library does. This context is a semantic environment that influences your thinking and behavior. When you’re working in a word processor, processing words is what you do. Those words end up in a document that you save in a filesystem, which is another semantic environment that has been established by a software user interface. It’s context all the way down!

Whether you’re designing a physical environment (such as a church) or an information environment (such as a word processor), you must be aware that you are creating a context that will affect how its users behave in it. The success of the design depends on whether or not it supports the goals its users have for the sort of place it creates. But there is another important set of goals the environment must accommodate: those of its creators. Lillian wants to be able to easily curate a document, and Microsoft wants to continue to generate revenues from providing access to its software. Successful environments bring these goals into balance. The next chapter examines what motivates people to behave in specific ways in their environments and what the incentives are that lead them to design environments to influence those behaviors.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

—Upton Sinclair