Designing Smart Artifacts for Smart Environments

The integration of information, communication, and sensing technologies into our everyday objects has created smart environments. Creating the smart artifacts that constitute these environments requires augmenting their standard functionality to support a new quality of interaction and behavior.A system-oriented, importunate smartness approach creates an environment that gives individual smart artifacts or the environment itself certain self-directed actions based on previously collected information. For example, a space can be smart by having and exploiting knowledge about the persons and artifacts currently situated within its borders.In contrast, a people-oriented, empowering smartness approach places the empowering function in the foreground by assuming that smart spaces make people smarter. This approach empowers users to make decisions and take actions as mature and responsible people.Although in some cases it might be more efficient if the system doesnýt ask for a userýs feedback and confirmation at every step in an action chain, the overall design rationale should aim to keep the user in the loop and in control whenever possible.