Building a context sensitive telephone

This paper is kind of a classic with regard to questioning the feasibility of creating context aware devices and modeling context. It explores realistic usage scenarios of context-aware devices from an ethnographic perspective. It brings up good points about the complexity of context and how people adapt norms to technology usage in an unpredictable and changing manner. The conclusions are probably sound, but they miss opportunities to design reasonable context-aware solutions and fail to consider the collective needs of society as opposed to the user.

Building a context sensitive telephone: Some hopes and pitfalls for context sensitive computing 2004
Barry Brown and Rebecca Randell
[Full-text: pdf]