What are Information Patterns?
This chapter is a part of the book “How to Build Thriving Start-up Ecosystems: Five Information Patterns for Success.”
In cities urban planners, developers, and residents talk often (and often heatedly), about where money should go. Developers might say it should go to roads, urban planners might call for drainage systems, residents want a greenway. While all these parties might not agree with each other, they can usually at least decide what a roadway is. They can see a map of a greenway, or a schematic of a new drainage system.
Information is different. It is really hard to talk about how people create mental maps. They are intangible, and any translation to a physical medium leaves much of a mental map’s richness out. Each person with their unique insights and background also has a different internal construction of how they perceive the world.
Patterns in Urban Science
Kevin Lynch, an urban planner and designer published his seminal book “The Image of the City” in the 1960’s. In it he developed a language of elements that people shared across individual mental maps. These elements include nodes where heightened activity and interaction occur, paths that act as channels that people take to move around the city, and edges that divide regions of cities. Districts were swaths of a city with defined characteristics, while landmarks were easily recognizable objects that serve as points of reference, such as monuments or towers.
Lynch’s development of a methodology to break down mental maps and analyze them across many people helped him to assess cities such as Boston, Cleveland, and San Diego to understand how the mental images people have of their city affects their behavior within these urban environments. He found cities with clear paths and distinct landmarks create high imageability that contribute to people having a clear, confident understanding of how to move around the city. Cities with winding paths and low frequency of nodes or landmarks make it so people develop sparse mental maps and only travel in their known neighborhoods instead of across the city at large.
Patterns in Cognitive Science
Two decades later in the 1980’s Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card reframed these ideas of mental maps through the lens of cognitive science. The notion of elements of mental maps within urban environments that Lynch outlined — landmarks, monuments, nodes, and paths — -were expanded to the digital realm (Pirolli, Card). Document size, layout, and hyperlink structures served as the digital realm’s districts and way-finding devices.
Pirolli and Card also recast the idea of urban elements for digital environments. An information pattern refers to an “organized and systematic arrangement of data or knowledge that follows a specific format or template, making it easier to process, understand, and act on” (Elmasri). Information patterns are characterized by the order of the elements of which they are made rather than the intrinsic nature of those elements (Wiener).
Patterns in Information Ecology
In 1999 Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O’Day in their book Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart connected the idea of information structures to information ecology. Information structures to them could be either digital or physical, but their purpose was to help people adapt to their environments. Effective structures are those that help people adapt well, while ineffective structures are those that do not. And just like biological ecosystems where the same food gathering techniques do not work in rainforests that work on the savannah, effective information structures change based on selective pressures of the environments around them (Nardi, O’Day).
One information structure in this context is the calendar, which holds in its form information about when a farmer should plow, sow, and harvest crops and manage livestock (Campbell). This structure enables farmers to learn from previous generations what combination of plants and planting times are likely to work best. This transfer of information has important survival implications: it lowers farmers’ risk of a small yield of their crop and in turn the risk of hunger. Today this information pattern of a calendar still exists, but has been adapted into the digital medium of the Google Calendar and other similar apps. The structure has also evolved to the needs of people now, becoming more associated with helping people not miss brunch dates and business meetings than staving off hunger.
Stories, whether passed down orally, chiseled into stone tablets, or digitally downloaded on a Kindle, are another information structure that helps impart wisdom of morality and cultural practices to future generations. Humanity’s ability to design information structures has freed it from the timescales of biological evolution to quickly adapt its ideas, culture, and companies to the surrounding world that changes ever faster in response.
Lynch’s research on the imageability of cities takes on a new meaning in the context of information ecology. People who can navigate a city more effectively might not just travel more extensively — their greater travel through the city can help them develop wider social networks that bring a higher chance of finding a love interest, a new friend, a job.
For an entrepreneur, a highly imageable entrepreneurship landscape might alter their chance of success.
