Presenting the Past: A Framework for Facilitating the Externalization and Articulation of User Activities in Desktop Environment

Work processes are conducted in various contexts and they involve different tasks, interruptions, activities and actions. In all of these, tacit knowledge plays a part. Some part of that tacit knowledge can be externalized and articulated by continuously monitoring the user’s activities. Because the desktop environment is an integral part of almost any office work context, we chart the demands the unstructured and discontinuous nature of work puts on the management of desktop working context. We discuss possibilities to augment the user’s awareness of his/her desktop working environment by providing a context-aware application that can act as a map-like resource for the user’s past activities on the desktop. We propose using temporal information to couple personal experiences with representational, more objective aspects of the context in order to make it possible for the user to express and retrieve subjectively significant activities with a minimal effort. We present an abstract model for designing an application for this purpose.