In my archival work, I specialized in processing and cataloging large donations of 500+ item collections. This work could be overwhelming on even the best days but, over time, I developed a successful process for tackling these types of projects.

If I did not need to preserve the context of the collection’s original order, I liked to lay out all the items across several tables and workbenches to get a better view of what the collection contained. Once I had a high-level view of the items, I began sorting everything into rough categories and labeling those categories in a way that would make sense to our end users – an open card sort, if you will. Only once I had physically handled and categorized the items could I feel confident about moving forward with my work because I had a much better understanding of the collection as a whole.

Little did I know that I was proving the theories that Stephen P. Anderson and Karl Fast, Ph.D. propose in their new book Figure It Out: Getting from Information to Understanding published by Rosenfeld Media earlier this year. It does a wonderful job of explaining how we make sense of the abundant (and sometimes overwhelming) amounts of information that surrounds us. The conclusions they draw have the ability to greatly influence how we practice design. Which is the reason why I recommend this book to all UX professionals but especially to those who work in the information architecture, usability research, content design, and interaction design spaces.

In their book, Anderson and Fast introduce a new perspective on how we make sense of the world around us through their use of the Extended Mind thesis. This thesis proposes that we not only parse information in our brains but also through our bodies using everything we have available to us in our external environments. That is to say, we make a habit of using our bodies and the tools we have on hand to extend our thinking beyond our brains, easing the cognitive load that large amounts of information can demand of them.

The book is divided into six distinct parts. Part 1 lays the foundation by explaining distributed cognition and the Extended Mind thesis. Then, Parts 2 through 6 provide convincing evidence for their theories by going into detail about how we use associations, external representations, interactions, intertwined systems, and tools to make sense of everything.

If that summary makes it sound like a highly theoretical textbook, I assure you it is not. The authors use real-world examples and concise summaries of academic research to help readers make the necessary connections between theory and application. For example, they open the book with an attention-grabbing example of how Anderson redesigned a chart containing complex and sensitive medical information to make it easier to read at a glance. If you weren’t already convinced that poorly organized information could lead to a life-or-death situation, you will be after reading how he dealt with this challenge.

The authors tackled a complex topic, and they did it well, making even the most abstract concepts approachable and relevant.

At 432 pages, Figure It Out is the longest book in Rosenfeld Media’s catalog to date. It’s also a dense read, with every page packed full of vital information. The authors tackled a complex topic, and they did it well, making even the most abstract concepts approachable and relevant. I appreciated chapter 11 on information seeking especially, which felt both comprehensive and succinct in its explanation.

With that said, readers should not expect to breeze through this in a single afternoon or come away with a step-by-step checklist they can apply right away. Anderson and Fast demand more from us. They might help us to make sense of the topic but it’s up to us to put it into practice.

Photo by Brandon Lopez on Unsplash

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