Everyday Encounters with Context-Aware Computing in a Campus Environment

Barkhuus, Louise and Paul Dourish, “Everyday Encounters with Context-Aware Computing in a Campus Environment“. In Proceedings of UbiComp 2004, Nottingham, UK, 2004.

This paper report on a field work which highlights that in heterogeneous groups, concerns such as location infrastructure, access and mobility can take on quite different forms, with very different implications for technology design and use. Context-aware computing attemps to make the context in which technologies are deployed and used into a configuration parameter for those technologies. In this paper, the authors consider context of a rather different sort – the social, organizational, and institutional contexts into which context-aware and ubiquitous technologies are deployed. They take the “embodied interaction” approach of ubicomp, that is moving the focus from the technology itself to the settings within which that technology will be employed. In their empirical investigation of the use of ubiquitous computing blending mobile and location-based technologies to create augmented experiences for university students (UCSD Active Campus project), they focuses on how the technology fits into broader social context of student life. They examined the factors that influence adoption and use of ubiquitous computing technologies and studies the emergent practices of ubiquitous computing (i.e. collective practices that emerge when a technology is put into the hands of an active user community)

The study revealed five concerns for the design of effective ubiquitous computing experiences at a large-scale:

• Technology design must be sensitive to the variability of institutional arrangements. That is that technology use is systematically related to people’s roles and relationships.
• Different temporal dynamics apply to laboratory settings and real-world settings. In real-world setting, new technologies must live along side old ones
• We must be attentive to infrastructure of all sorts (both technological and procedural infrastructures).
• Look at the relationship between technology and local cultural practices.
• Technologies are a means by which relationships between social groups are enacted.

Relation to my thesis: the move of ubiquitous computing from laboratory settings into the everyday world (in the trend of Abowd’s everyday computing). Barkhuus and Dourish show an example how observational and qualitative methods can offer a set of concepts to help for the design of ubiquitous environments. The five concerns mention are an inspiration for a paper on the design and deployment of CatchBob!

Valuable references include:

W. K. Edwards, V. Bellotti, A. K. Dey, and M. W. Newman. The challenges of user-centered design and evaluation for infrastructure. In Proceedings of CHI 2003, pages 297–304. ACM Press, 2003.

J. Scott and M. Hazas. User-friendly surveying techniques for location-aware systems. In Proceedings of UbiComp 2003, pages 44–53. Springer, 2003.