On Context

Ubicomp, pervasive computing and all the other buzzwords that the young people are in to these days get thrown about a lot but not many people are really thinking about what they mean. This really is quite strange because a bunch of people have been thinking about similar issues for years, and become quite well know for it, but only within a small community.

Beginning with Lucy Suchman and moving to Paul Dourish with sideways detours to Toni Robertson and Anne Galloway there are enough people out there who are really in to defining these terms to better understand what they are really for and what can be done with them.

IFTF is there, too:

First, “context” isn’t something that programmers or designers can either thoroughly describe or comprehensively predict; it’s something that emerges in the moment.

Second, context can change very rapidly. Making sense of context cannot merely be a matter of computers getting faster; it requires helping people, who are already better-equipped than any computer to figure out context.

Which has interesting resonances with my own research. Not only are people better at figuring out context, they’re better at figuring out people (and what they say and what they mean), too.