Generative Information Environments Lab
Architecture that aligns the needs of organizations, people, and society towards sustainable growth.
The School of the Possible is a self-organizing framework for fostering and scaling emergent, long-term, value-generating group activities. One way to participate in the school is to set up a “lab page” that clearly states your purpose. This is my lab page. (See this post if you want to start one of your own.)
For the past five hundred generations or so, our ancestors altered their physical environments to better suit their individual and social needs. They arranged simple physical elements to set aside places for particular uses, such as communal eating and storytelling. They built shrines to worship their gods. They created shelters to protect themselves, their families, and their stuff. They established roads and bazaars to exchange goods, and caravanserais to rest during their treks there. These structures do more than just meet physical needs. They create the contexts of rapport where civilizations emerge and flourish. For better or worse they reify culture, casting it (literally) in stone.
The design of places is called architecture. Architected places bring order to chaotic environments. They serve as the settings for the stories of our lives, and provide meaning and purpose through shared context. Most of our history has played out in (and been influenced by) such physical places.
In the past two hundred years or so, we’ve developed technologies that have enabled new types of places that are independent of physical space. The telegraph was a crude first medium for remote communion; subsequent ones have gotten much better. When you meet a friend in FaceTime, the two of you aren’t sharing a physical environment; you’re sharing an information environment.
As with buildings and towns, the form and structure of information environments create contexts that influence how we understand the world and each other. (And therefore, how we act.) The options in a website’s navigation structure define the boundaries of a place where you can play, learn, shop, work, and more.
Over the past thirty years or so, we’ve started to move key social interactions from physical environments to information environments. There are many advantages to doing so, but there are also great risks. We must approach the design of these information environments conscientiously so they sustain our social and personal needs in the long term.
What is the future we want to create?
By moving our activities to information environments, we’re not just dabbling with technology; we’re enabling a novel way of being in the world. This is true for us as individuals, groups, societies, cultures, and civilizations. The process of doing so has just started, but we’re already seeing the effects of living in these new types of places. To take just two examples, consider how you shop and how you engage in civic discourse have changed over the past decade.
Alas, current information environments are commissioned, designed, and built by people who don’t think of them as places. Instead, they think of them as products, services, interactions, experiences, or features. These frames are transactional and ephemeral—the opposite of what we need if our goal is to create long-term social viability. They cast us as consumers, users, or (in the worst cases) as sources of data to be harvested and sold to the highest bidder.
If we are to move key social interactions to information environments, we must acknowledge their place-ness. That requires we start thinking about how such places can accomplish their purposes in alignment with the purposes of the people who use them.
In the future, we will approach the design of information environments with the same level of care that we bring to the design of buildings and cities. Cities, in particular, are structures designed to support emergence and order in the long term. (They’re among our longest-lived artifacts.) In the long-term, this calls for new language and new approaches to design.
In the near-term, we aspire to:
- change current narratives of transactionality and disruption towards narratives of long-term place-making and stewardship, and
- apply lessons from architecture and urbanism to the design of software systems, with a view to creating sustainable places made of language.
Ultimately, our objective is a world in which information environments foster rapport and collaboration, instead of division and distrust. This requires better alignment between the goals of organizations, people, and society. We refer to systems that accomplish this as generative information environments, as opposed to the greedy information environments that are pervasive today.
Generative information environments:
- help us make choices that further our goals as individuals, organizations, and societies,
- respect and value our attention,
- create more value than they capture,
- are resilient, and
- do not compromise the viability of society as a whole.
How do you track progress?
We’ll track progress by noticing the way people talk about the objectives of the software systems they build and the way they go about designing them. Are executives acknowledging their systems’ role as the contexts where we spend important parts of our lives? If so, what are they doing about to improve their ability to serve these functions?
For example, in 2017 Mark Zuckerberg revised Facebook’s mission statement to the following: “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” This is an acknowledgement of the role this pervasive information environment plays in enabling community. I consider this progress.
That said, Zuckerberg’s laudable mission statement doesn’t address how Facebook will benefit from enabling community-building. For Facebook to continue as a going concern, it must generate revenue. As long as its primary income-generating strategy remains the segmentation of users into ever-narrower demographics to sell their attention, its efforts at community-building will remain misaligned with the goals of its users and society as a whole.
Thus, another mark of progress will be the degree to which important advertising-supported information environments (such as Facebook) diversify their sources of revenue to be in better alignment with the goals and aspirations of their users.
How are you doing so far?
Over the past decade, I’ve given presentations and led workshops about the subject of this lab at major design conferences around the world. I also publish a daily (well, almost daily) blog that explores, refines, and popularizes the lab’s mission.
I’ve also written a book — Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places — that examines generative information envieronments in-depth and offers guidelines for designing them. The book is being published in June 2018 by Two Waves Books. You can see a high-level introduction of its subject here:
What are you NOT doing?
- We’re not engaging in academic critiques of what’s wrong with the world; we’re designing new structures to fix it.
- We’re not designing these structures from the vantage point of an ivory tower; we’re stress-testing them in real-world conditions.
- We’re not inventing things when there are perfectly good things we can borrow.
- We’re not pursuing technological solutions when social solutions suffice.
What have you learned so far?
Awareness of the problems this lab targets is growing in the mainstream. Examples include the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. presidential election and Brexit (two civic events in which information environments played a significant role), the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and the “retail apocalypse” in the U.S., which has been widely attributed to the rise of online shopping. This is all happening independently of our efforts, but it establishes the right context for this lab to be successful.
How can you help others?
If you believe your organization could benefit from better stewardship of its information environments, I’d love to give a presentation or workshop for your team(s).
If you need help designing an information environment that aspires to sustainable long-term growth, I want to talk with you about how I can help through my design consulting practice.
What help do you need?
We need more passionate and thoughtful designers willing to bring both craft and rigor to the architectures that will define life in the 21st century and beyond.
You can also help by letting people know about Living in Information. For news about the book’s upcoming release, please sign up for my newsletter.
Lab leader
For more information about lab leader Jorge Arango, visit https://jarango.com. Jorge is @jarango on Twitter, and you can reach him via email at jarango@jarango.com.
