Explaining Information Science 2: You Can’t Get Anything Done

At some point in most people’s lives, they sit down and try to do something. There are a variety of methods of figuring out how people do things, but I thought I’d try and explain this in sort of an information science friendly way. So, here’s a lovely(ish) explanation of why you can’t get anything done (in information science, with pictures and diagrams.)

Obviously, actually doing something presupposes an actor, and generally, this actor is a person. This causes a number of inconveniences, but as of yet there hasn’t been much we can do about it. Occasionally, you get computers doing things on behalf of people and complicated rube goldberg machines with gears, rope, and most of the contents of a decrepit hardware store, but let’s not try to draw one of those. We’ll also ignore robots, because we know how that sort of thing generally turns out.

So, yeah, you have this person sitting around and then suddenly they get a crazy idea that they actually want to do something. If we can’t dissuade them of this, we’ll call it ‘performing an action,’ and put it on the diagram as follows. It’s customary to represent the action as an arrow with subject and object at the head and tail, but here we’re going to make the action a circle and the arrow can be doing. For example, consider bob goes to the store — typically, you’d represent this as subject ‘bob’ action: ‘goes to the store’, but here we’re representing this as subject: ‘bob’ object: ‘goes to store’, with the action ‘does.’

This is called ‘reification,’ and is like ‘objectification’ for verbs. It’s either a complex intellectual process or a handy trick for making diagrams. At any rate, it’s a suitably long word.

You might say okay, that sounds fairly reasonable and non-problematical, but it just gets more complex from there.

Most people have a very complicated view of the world, but despite that manage to get through life without too many unusually horrible things happening to them. There are occasional exceptions to this, like people whose worldview consists entirely of ‘stuff’ or desire for products advertised on television. In general, though, people’s conceptual world consists of cloudy masses of ‘things’ and ‘stuff.’

Every action requires specific pieces of information do to it. For example, getting to work in the morning generally requires one to know where one’s pants (or pants equivalent) is.

People, with the possible exception of astronauts, don’t operate in a vacuum. They generally operate in a context, which can be summed up as ‘all the information that they bring with them to a particular task.’ This context is accumulated throughout people’s entire lives, and can conveniently be thought of as ‘why other people are wrong.’But are people actually wrong, or do they just have different opinions on what makes up reality?

The last part of this is the domain, which reflects that people, even thought they may be doing the same action with the same information and same context, may do something entirely different depending on the ‘field’ they’re working in or trying to serve. To use a somewhat gross simplication, the action “this hamburger should have cheese on it” may have a very different response depending on the environment (sort of restaurant) the person is working in, even if it’s the same person.

To top this off, things like Cognitive Work Analysis divides domain up into about 7 different layers, all of which come together in a big bullseye, but I’m only making so many lines in these damn diagrams. Personally, I think about this as as a massive oversimplification of this and call it the PICAD model, because calling things ‘ACRONYM model’ makes it seem more impressive than a bunch of circles with arrows in a box.