Controlling, Integrating, and Engaging Context in Urban Computing Research

Understanding the interplay between technology and urban life is the basic question of urban computing research. In addition to using context to achieve realism in evaluation, urban computing studies often need to consider context of use outright as an element under study. Doing so requires new ways of thinking about context that may not fit neatly into traditional categories of experimental design. In this paper we present our experiences in attempting to manage context in studies involving urban way finding and other social spatial activities. We reflect on our attempts to treat context as a set of controllable factors, to integrate some uncontrolled aspects of context into our experiments, and to engage contextual realism outright. The paper concludes with recommendations for managing context in urban computing study design based on these experiences.