Activity and Context for Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing Users Manasawee Kaenampornpan and Eamonn O’Neill Department of Computer Science University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY England {cspmk,eamonn}@cs.bath.ac.uk Abstract In order to have a principled approach to mobile and ubiquitous systems design, we need to understand the context in which the systems will be used. We discuss the impact of mobile and ubiquitous computing on users’ activities. We introduce Activity Theory as a tool to help us understand users’ activities in their context. We refine our framework by extending Activity Theory to capture history, which allows us better to understand users’ activities. 1. Introduction According to the Siemens Mobile Phones’ December 2003 Asian mobile lifestyle survey, 52% of Thais perceive mobile phones as their “personality’s technology extension” [Eskola, 2004]. Mobile phones have become an integral part of our lives. This is not limited to the use of mobile phones; small computer devices such as laptops and personal digital assistants (PDAs) have become very popular too. With new technology such as small computer devices and a wireless network, users are able to use computing devices anywhere and anytime – users are now living in a mobile and ubiquitous computing environment. Mobile and ubiquitous computing is not limited to the use of small devices but also includes computing devices and services embedded in the environment. Therefore mobile and ubiquitous users are able to access different devices, both personal and public. For example, in the mobile and ubiquitous office, Malee can use her PDA to access client data in the office database while she is rushing off to meet a client. She requests a hard copy of the data to be printed at the nearest printer in the office so she can grab it on her way out. Several examples of a mobile and ubiquitous computing environment have been described in the past [Hopper et al., 1997; Selker and Yan, 2000]. However, there is a lack of a well established design method for developing mobile and ubiquitous computing systems. A key factor in developing a principled approach to mobile and ubiquitous systems design is to understand and design for the context in which the systems will be used. However, the research area of context [Chen and Kotz, 2000; Dey, 2001; Kaenampornpan and O'Neill, 2004] is itself quite undeveloped and does not have well established methods and techniques. We propose Activity Theory [Engeström et al., 1999] as a framework for 1