A descriptive model of contextual activities for the design of domestic situations

A challenging topic for cognitive ergonomics and cognitive engineering is the development of smart applications and devices which apply some “intelligence” of the situations, i.e. commonsense knowledge about the occupants of the household, their individual and collective routines, and their expected patterns of behavior. Most people spend more time at home than in any other place, including work places, but few studies have been conducted on how new context-aware technologies could support people in their everyday life. Spaces that subtly reconfigure themselves according to their occupants and use can cause rejection or acceptance, depending on how intelligently they are designed. In this paper we describe a descriptive framework for contextual activities that aims to support collective thinking about the design of services for the domestic users.