Context and Design Agents

Abstract. Informal notions of context often imply much more than that captured in many computational formalisms of it. The view presented in this paper, built on our understanding of designing, is of context being larger than any one agent’s representation of it. This paper describes how for an agent’s reasoning about context it is the current situation that determines what the agent’s interpretations of context are, not the reverse. The paper presents a typical scenario involving collaborating, sketching designers.