A Foundational Framework for Situated Computing

Paul Dourish

Computer Science Laboratory

Xerox Palo Alto Research Center

INTRODUCTION

“Context” has become the word of the moment. Contextaware computing is a hot topic, the focus of research grants, workshops, conferences, development programs and a stream of publications. Systems that take advantage of context in different ways are seen as the natural solution to the information explosion, as ways to smooth interaction with an increasingly complicated information infrastructure, and as a way to build service and brand loyalty in commercial information operations. Technically, the incorporation of context into interactive software systems may take many different forms. Contextual information can be exploited in many different ways – e.g. by capturing contextual information for later recall and review, by exploiting contextual factors to customise the interactive experience, by sharing contextual information between collaborators, or by storing context along with data to help disambiguate it at a later date. Similarly, my own work on context has also taken many different forms, from explorations of the role of physical context in multimedia communication [2, 6], to the role of context in information interpretation [1], and most recently the role of context to solve specific problems in collaborative information management [3, 4].

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