I’m writing and editing this book review at the local branch of my public library. The building itself was recently renovated with a layout that separates the quiet study areas, like the ones I favor for writing, from the louder and more heavily trafficked areas, like the entrance lobby and the conference rooms. This allows different groups of people to use the same building for their own pursuits, and they can be assured that it will allow them to achieve what they came to do.

Looking beyond the physical library space into its inner workings, libraries use complex organizational and retrieval systems to lend materials, like books and music, to anyone with a library card. Both the libraries and their patrons operate within a larger system that sees a benefit to giving the public access to information.

We all exist in spaces and environments like these without realizing how they impact us. However, Jorge Arango recognized their influences and saw them as lessons for how we should design our digital spaces and environments. In his book, Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places, he argued that we can and should design these new digital spaces like we design physical ones – with the assumption that what we’re creating will impact society in a number of ways that we can’t even begin to understand.

An ecommerce website, a Slack channel, a Facebook group – all these spaces are information environments.

In his opening chapter, Arango posed the thesis of his book as a question: “How can we design information environments that serve our social needs in the long term?” In order to understand his thesis and the solutions he proposed, we first need to understand the meaning of the term “information environment.” According to the author, an information environment is a space mediated through words and images, and transmitted via an interface, such as a screen. At first, this definition appears to be too broad and general. If that’s all that’s required of an information environment, then technically any website or digital platform can be considered one. An ecommerce website, a Slack channel, a Facebook group – all these spaces are information environments. They are places we visit to work, shop, learn, and socialize. This broad definition, it turns out, is an effective tool for shifting our perspective from regarding these websites as business platforms to seeing them as spaces where we live our lives every day.

True to the subtitle of his book, Arango used this expanded definition of an information environment to argue that designers have a social responsibility to think about the impact of their design products. If people are living their lives inside the platforms and websites we create, then we need to think carefully about how we engage and incentivize our users. And we need to think preemptively about how they could use features within these information environments to harm others. Arguably, this could be one of the most important skills a designer possesses.

What sets Arango’s book apart from others in this space is his last chapter, entitled “Gardening,” where he explained how and why we should design information environments that will grow and change over time. Although it’s impossible to know exactly how people will use our products in the future, understanding that it will change as its users change demands that we develop these environments with intentionality. This idea reminded me of S. R. Ranganathan’s five laws of library science, particularly the fifth law: a library is a growing organism. But growth can only happen when we cut and remove things that aren’t benefiting the space anymore. A library isn’t a random group of books but an intentionally designed collection that librarians routinely weed to remove materials that are no longer serving its users. We should approach the design of an information environment in a similar way by asking our users what’s no longer serving them and making room for what matters.

Many of the concepts discussed in this book are highly cerebral. I think Arango recognized this. He consciously used tangible, real-world examples to describe concepts like context and how they impact people in physical spaces that draws parallels to our new digital environments. That’s why I recommend Living in Information to anyone who’s interested in this topic, not just UX design practitioners and product managers. It would be especially helpful to people who want to understand why they act and interact differently on Twitter than they do in their workplace Slack channel.

Photo by Benjamin Ashton on Unsplash