Kathy Sierra writes on the geography of context. The main takeaway: North Americans remove objects from their context; Asians always consider the whole picture.
A thought-provoking reminder of our differences as a species. I am defiitely guilty of removing objects from their context and looking at them in isolation. However, working with computer systems on a daily basis is one method that I find for helping maintain contextual grounding.
Ok…the above sentence was hideous. What I meant to say is that workig with complex Internet systems forces a person to always think of devices, applications and configurations in the context that they exist.
In fact, that is the main failing inside most of the organizations that I work with. There is no overarching understanding of how all of the systems work together.
So, the culture of context can exist within an organization. I gravitate towards people who are able to bring in the whole picture.
Who do you spend time with? Isolationists or Inclusionists?