While a desktop computer may be appropriate on a desk, other shapes, such as PDAs or wearable computers, are more suitable for other situations. Augmented reality, for example, merges computers with ordinary physical objects. By blurring the limits between what is and what is not a computer, it seeks to better integrate the physical and computational worlds. Today's interfaces exploit only a small fraction of human capabilities, overloading the visual channel while virtually ignoring audio and tactile feedback and reducing the flexibility and virtuosity of the human body to tapping keys and pointing. At the cognitive level, computers should complement inadequate skills, such as short-term memory, without trying to take over intellectual skills requiring human judgment.
People act within an implicit context that affects patterns of work in complex ways.
Computers should respond flexibly, allowing users to react and shape the current context, without having to explicitly define it in the computer's terms. CSCW and groupware systems have had little impact on the corporate world, mostly because they fail to account for the real needs of users in a social context. Social interaction is characterized by a variety of communication patterns and substrates, formal or informal, synchronous or asynchronous, direct or mediated, which are often implicit. Current technology gets in the way of social interaction because it forces explicit actions from the user. For example, our peripheral awareness helps us monitor and react to what is happening in the environment.