MEX

MEX Pathway #14 is our ongoing exploration of context aware user experience, something we’re working on closely with Qualcomm. One aspect of the Pathway examines the contextual relationship between humans and the machines trying to understand their behaviour.

In an attempt to identify how users think about their own context, we asked the MEX community to complete the sentence: “Dear internet, my current context is…”

The answers surprised us, both in their language, structure and use of media. Here are a few examples:

• Dear internet, my current context is PASSIVE.
• Dear internet, my current context is, well, tough to explain. What I do know, is that it leads me to seemingly engage in conversation with inanimate objects.
• Dear internet, my current context is Canadian First Nations culture and language.
• Dear internet, my current context is…well, you already know, don’t you? Or at least you should, you naughty internet, you.
• Dear internet, my current context is fragmented and I am searching for a way to unify my experience based on my activity. Oh … P.S. I’m late.
• Dear internet, my current context is the sum of several fragmented hardware, identity and timeframe contexts.
• Dear internet, my current context is inconsistent, my savings got minimized at high definition! Improving usability didn’t work.
• Dear internet, my current context is diffuse. . .seeking concurrency.
• Dear internet, my current context is slightly to the left of here and now.

Thanks to Qualcomm, we were able to choose a winning entry and award them a ticket to attend the 11th international MEX in London on 19th – 20th September 2012, where the Pathway #14 theme of context will be at the heart of the agenda.

The winner we chose was Tine Stevnhoved, who submitted this entry, combining both Twitter and Instragram. It interested us for the creative use of mixed media and raising the question of how machines could ever hope to interpret something as human as the sense of deja vu:

“Dear internet my current context is now a deja vu.”

Congratulations to Tine, who we’ll look forward to welcoming to MEX.

In addition to being the subject of several previous essays and at the heart of the September 2012 MEX agenda, Pathway #14 is the subject of a research collaboration with Qualcomm. Peter Whale and Peter Andic, both of Qualcomm, are speaker and facilitator respectively at MEX in September 2012.