Context-aware technology:: A phenomenological perspective

Context-aware systems are currently to a large extent designed from a systems perspective. Research on these technologies has so far mostly been focused on exploring what can be built and less on how it will show up in people's lives. The existing theory and practice in human-computer interaction has mainly evolved from work on graphical user interfaces, and additional theory is required to enable user-centered design of context-aware systems. Interaction with such systems is to a larger extent physical, and an appropriate theory consequently needs to account for the user's bodily nature. We have found the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty to be a good starting point for the development of such theory. With its first-person focus on the lived body and its relation to the environment, it provides a conceptual framework well suited for understanding context-aware systems from the user's perspective. The perspective moves the focus from seeing a context-aware system as an artifact "sensing" information, to seeing it as an interactive system with a physical user interface. This makes the distinction between foreground and background interaction a property not of the system, but of the situation. A consequence of this philosophical standpoint is that context can never be a property of the world, but that context rather is the horizon within which the user makes sense of the world. The phenomenological perspective enables a systematic exploration of the design space for context-aware systems-as they appear to the user. It further enables an analysis of the requirements for a seamless integration between screen-based and context-aware systems. The essay ends by pointing to the need for making the technology available in a form that can be easily utilized by interaction designers.