Context-aware artifacts can be seen as an important class of socially adept technologies. In this paper, we focus on the fact that disregarding trivial notions of context, context-aware artifacts are far from being capable of recognizing situations. Similarly, we are not aware of any other technologies that are able to understand social settings in a non-trivial way. In this paper, we sketch the underlying reasons and discuss some issues concerning the design of context-aware artifacts and socially adept technologies in general that result from these limitations.
Stephen Marsh, Lucy T. Nowell, John F. Meech, Kers