Abstract
Ubiquitous computing envisions seamless access of mass-scale services over the multitude of contexts that users encounter in their everyday mobility. However, to be successful such computing must simultaneously be designed to provide transparent, integrated, and convenient support in localized use contexts. Thus, the issue of multi-contextuality makes the design of ubiquitous computing services and environments a challenging endeavor. While ubiquitous computing requires attention to the multi-contextuality of people’s mobile device use encompassing spatial, temporal, and social dimensions of mobility, the typical avenue for IS research studies has been the single context (e.g., team, organization, or inter-organizational).
This paper reports on a grounded action research study with the objective of developing and testing design principles for handling multi-contextuality in an increasingly important ubiquitous computing environment – the car. Already supporting people’s everyday mobility and promising to provide ubiquitous availability of computing and communication infrastructure, the car is indeed a relevant setting for investigating the co-existence of different use contexts in ubiquitous computing. Contributing to the early stage of the ubiquitous computing research tradition, this paper not only empirically demonstrates that the car as a ubiquitous computing environment can improve the convenience of people’s everyday mobile device use by providing multi-contextual support. The paper also suggests our design principles and their associated socio-technical implications to be valid for other ubiquitous computing environments. Indeed, synchronizing fluid use patterns, scaling service manipulation, and signaling context-switches through awareness support lie at the heart of weaving ubiquitous computing environments conveniently into the fabric of people’s everyday mobility.