Читать книгу Living in Information - Jorge Arango - Страница 6
Contents and Executive Summary
ОглавлениеWe are in the midst of a major social transformation—moving many of our day-to-day activities from physical places to information-based places that we experience on our phones and computers. The central question of this book is: How can we design these information environments so they serve our social needs in the long term?
The form and structure of our environments shape our interactions with each other and with our social institutions. For most of our history, we’ve operated within physical environments. But now we are also inhabiting environments that are made of information.
Our relationship with our environments establishes contexts that influence our thinking and behavior. Our awareness of where we are and what we can do there is informed by affordances and signifiers in the environment.
The form and structure of our environments have not emerged arbitrarily; instead, they have developed over time to help us fulfill particular needs. These needs are driven by incentives that influence both design constraints and intended user behaviors.
The business model that drives today’s most popular information environments incentivizes users to pay attention to the environment itself instead of each other. This leads to social dysfunction.
In addition to business incentives, technology also influences the form and structure of our environments. Virtual and augmented reality, artificial intelligence, voice-based user interfaces, and the blockchain are five current technologies that promise to change the structure of our environments and how we experience them.
We can intentionally design our environments to better serve our needs. Architecture is the design discipline that is focused on structuring our physical environments, and information architecture is the design discipline that does the same for information environments.
Architects define the conceptual structure of our environments, which is perhaps the single most important factor in how we experience them. In information environments, these structures manifest as labeling and navigation systems that impose distinctions between parts of the environment.
Environments are not just structural constructs; many other systems must work in concert to make it possible for them to serve our needs. Architects must consider how these systems work together.
These systems are constantly changing. Architects must vie to make them evolve in ways that don’t compromise their integrity or usefulness in the long-term. Some parts of the environment evolve more slowly than others; long-lasting environments establish structural distinctions that generate social, economic, and ecological value.
Ultimately, creating environments that support our needs in the long term requires that we relinquish top-down control in favor of a more generative approach. Such an approach encourages emergence and continual evolution while preserving integrity and generating value.
