Toward intelligent environments: supporting reflection with smart objects in the home.

In our spaces, which are increasingly computational and intelligent, we use objects in our daily activities. Through this article, I seek to build upon existing bodies of knowledge that are well grounded in architecture and HCI. They suggest that we first observe the pattern of people’s activities and the objects of use in a space in order to design better and supportive architectural spaces, as well as to design better computing artifacts that can support user activities. In this way, an architectural space becomes smart by supporting natural existing relations within it, such as relations among people, objects, activities, and the space itself. Further, considering these relations when designing smart objects to support reflection about an activity—instead of creating new objects and consequently new usage and interactions—is a valuable way of structuring the analysis of complex spaces. This is well grounded in theories (e.g., distributed cognition) that describe how people think with objects, and that reflection is distributed across people, objects, and spaces. There are three main relations between the architectural space and other components in it: people, activities, and objects. Analyzing those relations becomes even more relevant as we increasingly consider reflection as a goal for design outcomes, especially for the design of smart and interactive artifacts