Using today's technologies in tomorrow's contexts

Abstract: New technologies are constantly being developed and their success depends highly on finding applications that uses them. A couple of the latest additions to this category are mobile positioning via the GSM-net and mobile Internet. They are both predicted to play an important role in the future. The problem of developing applications for these technologies are many but the most important ones are the limited performance on the current PDA?s. These limitations force the applications to be extremely cheap both on the usage of memory and the use of processor capacity. This affects which kind of applications that are possible to implement on the PDA?s. This report offers a description of a project that aimed at developing applications using mobile Internet and mobile positioning. We focus on the development of the parts that include user involvement and describe our way of dealing with a design process that aims at designing for a nonexistent context. But this report also provides an attempt at identifying what is important when designing applications for a future context. We argue the importance of both practical attempts like the Mapster project and ethnographical studies of situations in the present similar to the future context where the applications are to work.