Facilitating Context Switching Through Tangible Artifacts

Modern information workers typically juggle multiple tasks at the same time and manage these multiple task threads or working contexts through either physical or digital artifacts. These artifacts help the worker to keep track of the identity and state of the tasks. This practice of using artifacts in this manner isn't as well supported for digital representations of work contexts. This paper details work on a prototype system, "Context Manager", that creates explicit representations of work contexts and their related documents and links them to physical RFID-infused artifacts. An evaluative study of the system was conducted and its findings are analyzed in accordance with grounded theory.