Understanding Context ─ Environment, Language, and Information Architecture

Technology is destabilizing the way we understand our surroundings. From social identity to ubiquitous mobility, digital information keeps changing what here means, how to get there, and even who we are. Why does software so easily confound our perception and scramble meaning? And how can we make all this complexity still make sense to our users?

Understanding Context, a new book by Andrew Hinton, offers a powerful toolset for grasping and solving the challenges of contextual ambiguity. By starting with the foundation of how people perceive the world around them, it shows how users touch, navigate, and comprehend environments made of language and pixels, and how we can make those places better.

Some of what you’ll learn includes:

• How language creates infrastructure, in organizations, software applications, and the Internet of Things
• Essential elements of how users understand the environment through embodied cognition
• Models for figuring out the contextual angles of any user experience.
• How composition and narrative structure can create cohesion for users over time and across channels
• Why some places seem to make sense, and some don't, and why digital information makes sense-making even more challenging
• How information functions in three modes—physical, semantic, and digital—and stitch together the "maps we live in"

Understanding Context is ideal for information architects, user experience professionals, and designers of websites and applications of any scope. If what you design connects one context to another, you need this book.

Since drawing D&D dungeons on graph paper at age 12, Andrew Hinton has had a passion for creating environments with information. And since before the advent of the Web, Andrew has been designing digital information environments of one kind or another, working with clients and employers of all shapes and sizes, from Fortune 500s to small non-profits, and from e-commerce to education.
Andrew is a well-known speaker, writer and long-time community member of the information architecture, interaction design & user experience fields, as well as a co-founder and past board member of the IA Institute. But besides all that, he's a dad, a husband and the keeper of a "spirited" Boston Terrier named Sigmund.
He now plies his trade as an Information Architect at the IA consulting firm known as The Understanding Group (aka TUG). (http://understandinggroup.com). And he keeps a home on the web at andrewhinton.com, which conveniently links to his blog at inkblurt.com. You'll also find him kvetching about whatever flotsam is on his mind via Twitter at @inkblurt.