Design goals and philosophy
The current ContextPhone version is the result
of several development iterations and repeated
evaluations of real-world use. Our development
experiences led to several design goals.
The first is to provide context as a resource. The
platform represents the user’s machine-sensed context
in a way that humans can understand and
communicates it to the user’s environment when
appropriate. The context thus becomes a resource
for social interaction, not just input to machine
adaptation. Humans can thus construct new
meanings from the contextual information.2
The second is to incorporate existing applications.
Most previous work, including our own,
has implemented custom-built hardware systems
or isolated applications. To accommodate the
deeply intertwined nature of human mobility practices,
ContextPhone interfaces and integrates with
existing Smartphone applications, particularly
messaging and calling functions.
The third is to offer fast interaction and unobtrusiveness.
In mobility, cognitive-interaction
resources are seriously fragmented and interrup-