CONCEPT
The Architecture of Attention
The design of information and production environments reconceived as civic architecture — structural choices about what users notice, what they overlook, what feels important, that shape cognition as consequentially as urban design shapes public life.
Every information environment is an architecture of attention. It determines what occupants notice and what they overlook, what captures focus and what fades into background, what feels important and what feels irrelevant. The architecture operates through design — the placement of elements, the flow of movement, the distribution of emphasis — and its most consequential effects are the ones occupants do not perceive, because the architecture shapes perception itself. Pariser has argued since 2011 that the design of digital information environments is civic architecture, and that decisions made by platform designers are decisions about the structure of public life with consequences as significant as those made by urban planners about cities.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The AI-augmented workspace is an architecture of attention with specific and consequential features. The first is the primacy of the response: the builder's attention is dominated by the AI's output, and everything else — her own incipient