Activity and context for mobile and ubiquitous computing users

In order to have a principled approach to mobile and ubiquitous systems design, we need to understand the context in which the systems will be used. We discuss the impact of mobile and ubiquitous computing on users’ activities. We introduce Activity Theory as a tool to help us understand users’ activities in their context. We refine our framework by extending Activity Theory to capture history, which allows us better to understand users’ activities.