Living in Information. Jorge Arango

a building’s form conveys to your senses the possibilities for action that it makes available to you. A wall keeps meetings private. An opening on the wall allows you to cross through to the other side. A sidewalk encourages you to walk in a particular direction. A bolted door makes it impossible for you to enter (and lets you know that’s the case). A glass storefront gives you a preview of the goods sold inside. Your senses take in these physical features of the place automatically; they let you know what you can and can’t do there.

      At the symbolic level, places convey information by using location, scale, symmetry, rhythm, material selection, and more, to establish their relationship to other elements in the environment. If you’ve ever visited the National Mall in Washington, D.C., you’ve experienced the power of an architecture designed to convey symbolic information about the place.

      In the National Mall, the location of buildings with relation to open spaces, their relative sizes, the materials used in their construction, their architectural language, and so on have been carefully chosen to have a specific effect on you. These buildings’ forms provide much more than mere spaces for people to debate and enact the laws of the United States. The particular effect they have on you will depend on many factors, starting with whether or not you are a U.S. citizen.³

      

      The National Mall in Washington, D.C.

      PHOTO BY JOHNNY BIVERA, PUBLIC DOMAIN, HTTPS://COMMONS.WIKIMEDIA.ORG/W/INDEX.PHP?CURID=32519919

      To summarize, physical environments both convey information and create the contexts necessary for people to exchange information with each other. In a very real sense, buildings and cities are the original social networks. They’re also cultural manifestos in stone and terra cotta; they keep relating stories long after the people who created them left the scene. Given how central placemaking has been to our species, and the degree to which places work for us regardless of our level of education, it is no exaggeration to claim that architecture was our earliest, most enduring, and perhaps most important information technology.

      

      Chartres Cathedral conveys information about man’s relationship to the divine through the configuration of space in and around the building, and through more literal carvings on its surfaces.

      PHOTO © GUILLAUME PIOLLE, CC BY 3.0, HTTPS://COMMONS.WIKIMEDIA.ORG/W/INDEX.PHP?CURID=10219594

       Information

      We need to take a step back here. I’ve said that physical environments convey information and serve as contexts where people convey information to each other, and that places are an information technology. I’ve also talked about “information environments,” and suggested they are different from physical environments. Before we go any further, we need to look more closely at this word “information” to make sure we’re on the same page.

      You normally think of information as something you find in books, newspapers, and websites; the stuff in the world that adds to your knowledge. You talk about living in the “Information Age” and being “information workers”; your phones and computers are “information technologies.” But information is not only something you learn through books and websites, but it’s also part of your surroundings. In fact, you couldn’t make sense of the world without it. There’s information all around you at this very moment. So what is it?

      You can think of information as anything that helps reduce uncertainty so that you can make better predictions about outcomes. That’s somewhat abstract, so let’s look at a pedestrian example. Every morning I walk my dog, Bumpkin, around our neighborhood. Most of the houses where we live have front yards. The owners of some of those houses have placed signs on their yards that look something like this:

      Information happens.

      IMAGE BY DAVID SWAYZE, VIA FLICKR, HTTPS://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/SWAYZE/3195122793

      Whenever I encounter a yard with one of these signs on it, I know I shouldn’t allow Bumpkin to poop there. It’s not that he can’t poop there; physically nothing bars him from going on the yard. Rather, the sign helps me predict a likely outcome of my decision to let him do it; namely, having to deal with an irate homeowner.⁴ The sign provides information about that particular yard; it sets a value for an attribute of the yard that sets it apart from the others around it. (You could express it in pseudocode: PoopHere = FALSE.)

      Note that this doesn’t mean the owners of yards that lack these signs think it’s OK to let dogs poop on them; they’ve taken no formal position on the matter one way or another.⁵ If I were to let Bumpkin poop in one of the yards with no signs, I could face an irate homeowner—or not. The yards with “no poop” signs on them have merely reduced my uncertainty on this matter with regard to that small part of the universe. Thus, they provide information that influences my actions when walking my dog.

      It’s easy to see how signs provide information, but what about other aspects of the environment? You get lots of information from other parts of your surroundings that also influence your actions. For example, many of the forms around you have been designed to let you know how they are meant to be used. Consider how the entrance of most public buildings is carefully designed so that you can easily find it, even if you’ve never visited that particular building before.

      

      Entrance to the High Court at Chandigarh, by Le Corbusier.

      PHOTO: HTTPS://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/INFANTICIDA/6204214446

      Architects highlight the point of entry to a building by recessing openings, creating deep shadows with cantilevered roofs, breaking the rhythms of the facade, or changing the roofline, among other techniques. Even though these aren’t literal signs in the same way that the “no poop” signs are, they’re visual cues that tell you something is happening at that point in the structure. They help reduce your uncertainty, and hence improve your ability to act. They provide information.

       Information Environments

      You may be wondering: If information is present everywhere around us, why make the distinction between physical and information environments?

      Over the course of our history, our species has produced technologies that have improved our ability to communicate, store, and process information. The first—and still most important—of these is language, at first spoken and eventually written. Language allowed us to inform one another over space and time. You needn’t have been born in Rome around 60 BCE to benefit from Lucretius’s wisdom; written language allows the information he compiled to bridge the gap between your two lifetimes.

      Over time, these information technologies have become better, faster, cheaper, and more ubiquitous. Paper scrolls were an improvement over clay tablets, codices an improvement over scrolls, printed books over manuscripts, and so on. Eventually, the telegraph allowed us to tap electricity to transmit information instantaneously over long distances. This enabled people to communicate in (almost) real time while being in different physical places. The telegraph was followed by a series of ever-more-powerful information technologies: wireless radio, the telephone, and television, to name the most important.

      Then, in the middle of