Context Changes Everything

by Jose HC on January 15, 2009

in Context,General

As I left work yesterday in extremely cold temperatures last night I could not ignore the very silly hat the gentleman walking ahead of me was wearing.  Although silly, I guarantee you he was probably much warmer than I was.

Context you see changes our behaviours.  In fact I would go even further and state that depending on the context the rules that govern behaviour will change.  Things we would not typically do under regular circumstances all of a sudden become acceptable in our minds and in perhaps even expected by others.

All this to say that when we talk about context it is more than simply saying that we are now standing in the park as opposed to sitting at our desk.   When thinking of context we should even go down the path of considering different scenarios perhaps involving:

  • mood changes
  • emotional and mental states
  • physical conditions (healthy; not healthy)
  • weather conditions
  • one hand, two hand… no hands
  • gloves or no gloves
  • clean or dirty hands… greasy fingers

This is not the post I started writing but it’s what came out.  Share some thoughts on context and we can consider it further.

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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }

Barbara Ballard January 15, 2009 at 10:49 am

We’ve been trying to incorporate as much of this type of context as possible into our design thinking and work. Alas, two problems: extracting the context, and getting clients to invest in differentiation based on context. Not easy.

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