Context Special: Re-evaluating the Relationship between Context and Action

In "What we talk about when we talk about context", published in Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, Paul Dourish of the University of California, Irvine, USA, is reflecting on the emergence of ubiquitous computing as a new design paradigm which poses significant challenges for human-computer interaction and interaction design. Gone is the well-understood domain of single users sitting at desks and interacting with conventionally-designed computers employing screens, keyboards and mice for interaction. The result is considerable interest in 'context-aware computing' - computational systems that can sense and respond to aspects of the settings in which they are used. So far, so good, but Dourish suggests that confusion surrounds the notion of 'context'. He juxtaposes the 'representational' stance implied by conventional interpretations of 'context' with a more dynamic reading of how context is created through everyday human activity.

Context is important, he argues, not least because 'when computation is moved "off the desktop", then we suddenly need to keep track of where it has gone'.

Context tends to be used in two ways in ubiquitous computing systems. In the first category, some systems encode context along with information so that it can later be used as a retrieval cue. A second, more common approach is to use context dynamically to tailor the behaviour of the system or its response to patterns of use. By incorporating context, system designers have hoped to make their systems more responsive to the different social settings in which they might be used.

But context has different meanings in different communities: 'On the one hand, it is a technical notion, one that offers system developers new ways to conceptualise human action and the relationship between that action and computational systems to support it. On the other hand, it is also a notion drawn from social science, drawing analytic attention to certain aspects of social settings.

Engineering approaches - including those that tend to dominate discourse about ubiquitous computing - inherit a positivist tradition, which posit 'accounts of social life that are independent of the observer'.

We can think of the positivist account of context as defining the problem as one of representation. In particular, four assumptions seem to underlie the notion of context as it operates in these systems.
1) Context is a form of information. It is something that can be known (and hence encoded and represented much as other information is encoded and represented in software systems).
2) Context is delineable. We can, for some set of applications or application requirements, define what counts as the context of activities that the application supports, and do so in advance.
3) Context is stable. Although the precise elements of a context representation might vary from application to application, they do not vary from instance to instance of an activity or an event.
4) Most importantly, context and activity are separable. Activity happens "within" a context. The context describes features of the environment within which the activity takes place, but which are separate from the activity itself.

Dourish holds up an alternative view of context, and discuss some of its implications. This alternative view takes a different stance of each of the four assumptions mentioned above:
1) Rather than considering context to be information, it instead argues that contextuality is a relational property that holds between objects or activities.
It is not simply the case that something is or is not context; rather, it may or may not be contextually relevant to some particular activity.
2) Rather than considering that context can be delineated and defined in advance, the alternative view argues that the scope of contextual features is defined dynamically.
3) Rather than considering that context is stable, it instead argues that context is particular to each occasion of activity or action. Context is an occasioned property, relevant to particular settings, particular instances of action and particular parties to that action.
4) Rather than taking context and content to be two separable entities, it instead argues that context arises from the activity. Context isn't just "there", but is actively produced, maintained and enacted in the course of the activity at hand.

He goes on to propose an interactional model of context, in which the central concern with context is with the questions, 'how and why, in the course of their interactions, do people achieve and maintain a mutual understanding of the context for their actions?'

The paper goes through the mechanisms by which people decide relevance, negotiate meaning through shared practices and determine context through interaction. In conclusion, it looks at kinds of design that best support practice and the emergence of practice.

'Ubiquitous computing technologies extend the reach of computation into the everyday world, and that world is one in which, through our everyday practice, we enact, sustain and reproduce new forms of social meaning. The meaning itself may, by definition, be something that can never be removed from the social world and encoded in the technical. Nonetheless, though, technology plays a critical role in the evolution of meaning within communities of practice.'

He gives three examples for ways of responding through design. 'In the first, the relationship between context and action is turned around, so that systems display aspects of their own context (which is more fixed) for interpretation by end users. In the second, the focus of context is again technical rather than human, but here relationship between context (metalevel description) and content (the system action) is laid open as one that is continually maintained and available for inspection and change. In the third, the structure that makes information meaningful is allowed to emerge out of human activity, rather than being specified in advance. In all three, the relationship between form, practice and meaning is reevaluated.'

Taken from "Personal and Ubiquitous Computing" (2004) 8: pp19–30.

Associated Link: What We Talk About When We Talk About Context (pdf)

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