Intelligibility and Accountability: Human Considerations in Context-Aware Systems

This essay considers the problem of defining the context that context aware systems should pay attention to from a human perspective. In particular, we argue that there are human aspects of context that cannot be sensed or even inferred by technological means, so context aware systems cannot be designed simply to act on our behalf. Rather they will have to be able to defer to users in an efficient and non-obtrusive fashion. Our point is particularly relevant for systems that are constructed such that applications are architecturally isolated from the sensing and inferencing that governs their behavior. We propose a design framework that is intended to guide thinking about accommodating human aspects of context. This framework presents four design principles that support intelligibility of system behavior and accountability of human users and a number of human-salient details of context that must be accounted for in context aware system design.