Some Thoughts on Using Context Awareness for Enhancing Knowledge Work Environments

As early as 1973, Peter Drucker described a shift in the structure of society in which knowledge workers were pointed out as the workers of the future. Definition: A knowledge worker is a person principally concerned with data, information, and knowledge as working objects, often working with these in both the physical world and the virtual world (digital information spaces), and sometimes in the borderland between them. Common work tasks are to create, search, refine, and mediate data, information, and knowledge. (Broberg, 2000) based on Drucker (1973) and Kidd (1994). As system designers, we take it as our task to provide knowledge workers with cognitive, physical and virtual tools that make their tasks easier, more efficient, fun, and creative. This document describes our conception of the relationship between context and knowledge work, as well as our attempts to create tools for knowledge work in integrated physical-virtual environments.