Presenting the Past: A Framework for Facilitating the Externalization
and Articulation of User Activities in Desktop Environment
Proceedings of the 39th Hawaii international Conference on System
Sciences, (2006)Abstract
Work processes are conducted in various contexts and they involve
different tasks, interruptions, activities and
actions. In all of these, tacit knowledge plays a part. Some part
of that tacit knowledge can be externalized and
articulated by continuously monitoring the user�s activities. Because
the desktop environment is an integral
part of almost any office work context, we chart the demands the unstructured
and discontinuous nature of
work puts on the management of desktop working context. We discuss
possibilities to augment the user�s awareness
of his/her desktop working environment by providing a context-aware
application that can act as a map-like
resource for the user�s past activities on the desktop. We propose
using temporal information to couple personal
experiences with representational, more objective aspects of the context
in order to make it possible for the user to
express and retrieve subjectively significant activities with a minimal
effort. We present an abstract model for
designing an application for this purpose.
