Operationalizing Context in Context-Aware Artifacts: Benefits and Pitfalls

Introduction When referring to computational artifacts, context awareness means that artifacts are to some extent able to sense the context in which they are being used. The idea is that artifacts determine the actual context of their use in order to adapt their functionality accordingly. An example for the potential benefit of context-aware artifacts is the idea of a context-aware mobile phone. Such a mobile would use context aspects, such as the user's identity, the user's location, and the user's current schedule, to determine the level of intrusiveness that would be appropriate when trying to notify the user of incoming calls. Notifications could range from ringing (quite intrusive) to buzzing or vibrating (less intrusive). The mobile even might suppress notifications of less important calls (not intrusive at all). Context-aware artifacts are of particular interest to the human-computer interaction (HCI) community as the interaction with artifacts and their interfaces moves from rather static desktops to less well structured environments. However, impacts of context-aware artifacts well exceed the highly inter-disciplinary field as the respective discussion of context may influence how context and context awareness is conceptualized in related disciplines. The discussion is of relevance to informing science as there are expectations that context-aware artifacts will enable context-specific information delivery. Software agents can be viewed as early software-based approaches to context-aware artifacts dealing with information. Examples discussed by Maes (1994), for example, include an agent for electronic mail handling and an agent for electronic news filtering. A more recent approach is an awareness information environment (Gross and Specht, 2001). Such an environment is expected to make use of context in order to "provide users with information that is related to their current context and therefore of most value for the coordination of the group activities". Most work in developing context-aware artifacts appears to be technology-driven by which we mean that development is driven by what is technically feasible rather than by what might be helpful in a situation. The difference between these two approaches matters if we consider social aspects that cannot be sensed by currently available technology (see below for examples). As a consequence, the context determined by context-aware artifacts may differ from what persons involved in the situation experience. It seems that not enough effort is spent on clarifying potentially unexpected and unwanted implications of context-aware artifacts. Also, much work on context-aware artifacts seems to operationalize concepts of contexts that are rather simple compared to what is understood as context in academic disciplines specialized on the subject matter. In this paper, we attempt to contribute to the discussion of context in context-aware artifacts from a cognition-oriented point of view. We proceed as follows. First, we discuss a recent technical definition of context which is typical for a lot of research in context-aware artifacts. Based on this definition, we outline the difference between context as a characterization -or model- of a situation and the situation itself which we understand as a social setting that has been negotiated among peers in the first place. Then, we discuss implications of this distinction. Finally, we draw our conclusions and outline future research directions. Operationalizing Context in Context-Aware Artifacts In the anchor article of the 2001 Human Computer Interaction (HCI) special issue on context-aware artifacts, Dey et al. (2001) review several definitions of context. They start with the definition given in Webster's Dictionary: "the whole situation, background or environment relevant to some happening or personality" and argue that this definition it is too general to be useful in context-aware computing. …