Elements of the City
But before investigating information environments, let’s first look at a physical environment: a city. I mentioned in Part 1 that Kevin Lynch coined the term wayfinding in his 1960 book, The Image of the City. In that same book, as you can see in Figure 1, Lynch also famously outlined the five elements of the city image:
- paths—The roads, footpaths, and transportation lines by which a person moves through the city.
- edges—The walls, railway lines, and shores that form the boundaries between areas.
- districts—Broad areas of the city that possess their own sense of identity.
- nodes—Points of interest that a person may visit—such as a junction, building, or city square.
- landmarks—A physical structure—such as a sign, building facade, or mountain—that serves as an external reference point.
Lynch treated these five elements as a basic vocabulary that we can use to describe existing city images, as well as to guide the planning of new urban development.
During his research, Lynch made two important observations that are particularly relevant to information environments. First, he did not consider the city’s physical form in isolation, but instead viewed the city through the eyes of its inhabitants. (In fact, the primary research method he used was a series of field studies with residents.) Second, Lynch discerned that there isn’t just one image of a city, but rather many sets of images that vary by scale—from the microscopic to the macroscopic.
“[The images of a city] were typically arranged in a series of levels, roughly by the scale of the area involved, so that the observer moved as necessary from an image at street level to levels of a neighborhood, a city, or a metropolitan region.”—Kevin Lynch
Lynch’s ideas on how people view and move through a city are insightful precursors to how people conceptualize and navigate information spaces today. Before we set out to identify the elements of information environments, however, we should first clarify the term information environment itself.
Defining the Information Environment
An information environment is a place to which someone goes to seek information and satisfy an information need. Web sites, mobile applications, scientific databases, corporate intranets, and other collections of information all qualify as information environments.
While my thinking has focused primarily on digital information environments, we could also extend the concept to physical places—for example, libraries, bookstores, museums, and even zoos and other outdoor learning areas.
Like the images of a city, information environments can vary in scale. A micro environment could be as small as a single screen of text, a printed page, or a poster on a wall. A macro environment could be as broad as the entire World Wide Web—as when we use a Web search engine—or could perhaps even encompass the totality of human knowledge.
Let’s use a few examples of information environments to frame the discussion that follows:
- Amazon.com—Shoppers visit this ecommerce store to look for and buy products.
- The New York Times—Readers come to this online newspaper environment in search of news.
- A company intranet—Employees come to a corporate intranet to find information that is relevant to their job.