Designing smart artifacts for smart environments

Smart artifacts promise to enhance the relationships among participants in distributed working groups, maintaining personal mobility while offering opportunities for the collaboration, informal communication, and social awareness that contribute to the synergy and cohesiveness inherent in collocated teams. Two complementary trends have resulted in the creation of smart environments that integrate information, communication, and sensing technologies into everyday objects. We distinguish between two types of smart artifacts: system-oriented, importunate smartness and people-oriented, empowering smartness. The system-oriented and people-oriented approaches represent the end points of a line along which we can position weighted combinations of both types of smartness depending on the application domain. We developed the Hello.Wall, our version of an ambient display, for the Ambient Agoras environment. The Hello.Wall transmits organization-oriented information publicly and information addressed to individuals privately.