「Understanding Context」という書籍の「Digital Information」部分の要約。読書会での説明資料（英文）UXデザインにおけるコンテクストの重要性とデジタル情報におけるコンテクストの考慮事項についての説明がある。

1. UNDERSTANDING CONTEXT
Summary of Chapter IV, Digital Information

2. “This is an abbreviation of chapter IV, “Digital
Information” from a book “Understanding
Context” by Andrew Hinton.
Without verbal explanation, some contents of
this document cannot be understood properly.
For more details, please refer the book.
http://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/1449323170/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_7onhxb02YHYZZ

3. PART IV.
DIGITAL INFORMATION
Roy S. Kim
@royskimJP

4. SUMMARY OF THIS CHAPTER
➤ Origins of digital technology, and why it is different from the
other modes.
➤ How digital information influences the way we understand
the world, the way we make software, and the properties of
digital agents and simulated affordances.

5. CHAPTER 12.
DIGITAL COGNITION
AND
AGENCY

6. ➤ Digital devices use ‘encoded information’ for improving accuracy and efficiency.
➤ The ‘meaning’ of a message is irrelevant to the engineering problem.
➤ Encoded information for digital devices cannot be understood by a human
without decoding and showing it in proper formats.
Example of Encoded information: TCP/IPのデータ構造
SHANNON’S LOGIC

7. ➤ Decoupling information from context
➤ We understand our experience by coupling with the
information the environment provides us; but digital
technology, by its nature, decouples its information from
our context.
➤ We need to think about design’s communication and craft
in more complicated and changed way for digital
information.

8. DIGITAL LEARNING AND AGENCY
➤ We need to create the
representation intentionally
or it can be done by some
algorithmic process.
➤ Without it, computers can
barely do any valuable
thing.
➤ Now we have technology that has agency; the ability to make
decisions and take actions on its own.
➤ Digital system only knows about the world by abstracted
representations of the real world.
Humans and digital agents learn in different directions.

9. ➤ What happens when you ask about the location of the
closest gas station to Siri?
➤ Siri does not know the meaning of the question.
➤ It just calculates and return result by the predefined
algorithm using structured data.
➤ What happens when you use Shazam to recognise a song?
➤ Just a “pattern matching” using its database.
➤ Emotional or cultural context of the song is ignored.
➤ In digital, context has to be artificially generated, from
already-abstracted inputs.

10. EVERYDAY DIGITAL AGENTS
➤ The number of rules to control physical
objects is restricted by its shape, size or
properties of the material .
➤ Digital agents can enact as many
thousands of couples rules as will fit on
device’s microchips.
➤ Digital agents are getting more complex and can go terribly
wrong!

11. EVERYDAY DIGITAL AGENTS
➤ It’s hard to figure out what is happening in the world with the
huge number of complex digital agents.

12. ➤ More concerns on context are required when ruling digital agents.
➤ The assumption on context can go wrong.
➤ How to prevent it?
➤ It is the age of automation now.
➤ Many digital agents are type of ‘Set it and forget it.’
➤ online subscriptions
➤ bill-pay withdrawals
➤ How to manage those digital agents?
➤ Can we really forget it?
➤ Will we need agents for keeping track of our agents?

13. ONTOLOGIES
➤ Computers do not need human-understandable context to
function within and among themselves.
➤ Computers need ontology to understand the human
context in order to execute complex processes.
➤ Word is not good enough to describe the human context.
➤ The Ontology describes concepts and relations among them
in a specific domain.
Which Java?

14. EXAMPLE OF ONTOLOGY: THE “PROGRAMME” ONTOLOGY OF BBC

15. EXAMPLE OF ONTOLOGY: RDF IN REAL
<rdf:RDF
xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
<rdf:Description rdf:about="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Benn">
<dc:title>Tony Benn</dc:title>
<dc:publisher>Wikipedia</dc:publisher>
</rdf:Description>
</rdf:RDF>

16. EXAMPLE OF ONTOLOGY: CONCEPT MAP

17. ➤ Ontology is still under developing.
➤ As designers, who are making user-facing environments,
ontology is about establishing the understandable semantic
functions that solve the contextual gap between person and
machine.
➤ Google’s service ‘Buzz’ failed because it adopted the
concept of friends improperly in their service.
➤ Boss, lover, and family are not the “friends.”

18. CHAPTER 13.
DIGITAL INTERACTION

19. INTERFACE AND HUMANS
➤ Digital interface has many layers of abstraction, so it is
necessary to provide environmental elements that human can
recognise and understand.
➤ Any digital systems require learning(or relying on learned
convention) for an artificial user interface of some kind,
because they will always be the need to translate the
abstraction of digital information into invariants that users can
comprehend, whether simple buttons, voice commands, mere
labels, or sensor-triggered gestures.
➤ We need to establish interfaces that are part of the
environment we inhabit and are themselves smaller
environments nested within the larger ecological context.

20. ➤ Digital interfaces have gone through a rapid evolution but
always require translation.

21. SEMANTIC FUNCTION OF SIMULATED OBJECTS
➤ This is not a pipe.

22. SEMANTIC FUNCTION OF SIMULATED OBJECTS
➤ This is not a pipe.
We don’t go around separating semantic and physical information.
We often use them as if they were interchangeable.

23. ➤ This is not a button.

24. ➤ This is not a button.
➤ You cannot smoke the pipe, but you
can “press” these buttons on the
screen.
➤ This is a semantic function,
simulating physical affordance.

25. ➤ Skeuomorphic vs flat design
➤ These are not a binary choice; the design approach is on
more of a spectrum.
➤ Consider user’s learned environmental convention, just like
the meaning of words and sentences to do right design.

27. ➤ Unlike our interactions with physical objects, we never
directly control what software does.
➤ Email software can have an “inbox” and “outbox”, but there
are no physical boxes.
➤ Digital technology takes the physical affordance for better
understanding: Extended cognition
➤ But there is a limitation too.(Simulation is simulation.)

28. MODE AND MEANING
➤ “Mode” is a condition that changes the result that the same
action would have under a different condition.
➤ Required to accomplish more things with the same number
of controls. So, the mode is unavoidable even though
with its risk.
➤ Useful, but challenging because mode can cause serious
troubles.
➤ On PC, unexpected “caps lock” mode makes you type
again.
➤ On Airplane, unexpected mode can take all passengers’s
lives.

29. ➤ “Mode” should be expressed very clearly.
➤ When users are aware of modes and motivated to learn about
them, the negative effect can be minimal.
➤ The iPhone turned the phone into an almost entirely modal
device: a slab of glass that can be just about anything,
depending on what application it is running.
➤ AppleWatch is using its “crown” for different functions
depending on the currently active application.
➤ We need digital agents to control “mode” of other digital agents.
➤ We simply cannot manage all the complexity.
➤ We need digital agents to help manage our digital agents.(WTF?)

30. CHAPTER 14.
DIGITAL ENVIRONMENT

31. VARIANT MODES AND DIGITAL PLACES
➤ The Rule-Driven Modes and simulated affordances of
interfaces are also the objects, events, and layouts that
function as places, whether on a screen alone or in the
ambient digital activity in our surroundings.
➤ Changing the mode of object can affects the mode of places as
well, especially when objects work as parts of interdependent
systems.

32. ➤ Software-based places
When in the shopping
tab, search results are
driven by different rules,
which you can see by
clicking the “Why these
products?” link
The invariant features of
the environment need to
make the difference more
clear by using semantic
functions to establish
context better.

33. FORAGING FOR INFORMATION
➤ When we use information environments, we are not paying
explicit attention to a lot of factors.
➤ Humans look for information by using behavior patterns
similar to those used by other terrestrial animals when
foraging for food.
➤ We take action in digital-semantic environments using the
same bodies that we evolved to use in physical
environments.
➤ Environments made mostly of semantic information lack
most of the physical cues our perceptual systems evolved
within

34. INHABITING TWO WORLDS AT ONCE
➤ There are on-screen capabilities that
change the meaning of physical places,
without doing anything physical to those
places.
➤ Adds a layer of digital behaviour that
changes, if only slightly, the functional
meaning of one physical context versus
another.
➤ Our smartphones make everyplace we
inhabit potentially “smart.”
Refresh podcasts by geolocation
in the downcast app

35. ➤ What is the My Store?
➤ The user didn’t select any store by herself. System assumed
it using a clue of information. But is it right? What if the
user is in her office or a cafe?

36. ➤ Do not fake simplicity but to embrace the complexity and
clarify it by making it more understandable.

37. AMBIENT AGENTS
➤ The networked objects of the urban landscape transform what
cities are to us.
➤ Rooms and buildings will henceforth be seen as sites
where bits meet the body — where digital information is
translated into visual, auditory, tactile, or otherwise
perceptible form, and, conversely, where bodily actions are
sensed and converted into digital information.
➤ Our inhabited places are fundamentally different, whether
online or offline, through the emergence of networked
consumer technology and government infrastructures.

39. ➤ Not only do hardware and software objects have agency, but
the “space(=places)” we inhabit can have agency, as well.
➤ Robots aren’t only in the form of objects that behave like
people or animals; entire building and cities can be
“robots” of a sort.

40. ➤ Everyware
➤ In the near future, everything around us will be based on
the planned choices of the human being.
➤ Systems use light-speed decision logic based on rules that
are increasingly written by the systems themselves.
➤ It’s important that bridging the “black box” dimension
of the digital agency with the human-scale world that
people can actually perceive and understand.
➤ Digital agents need to be transparent about their
limitations rather than present a simplified front that
inaccurately promises human-like coherence.