In todays society Smartphones and Wearables are a crucial part of our lives. Vendors use information collected by these devices to tailor their service delivery to the customers needs or use them to give birth to a whole new kind of services. In the literature context aware services are often examined from a technical perspective. Therefore the question of how context-aware services can be seen from a service perspective remains underrepresented in the current body of knowledge. 

The thesis aims to understand context-awareness and their meaning for the development of service systems from a socio-technical standpoint. Therefore IS literature is examined in a structured review and then synthesized to cover different perceptions, strands and appliances of context and context awareness in order to create an understanding of these terms and to derive design principles for the development of service systems.