The work is a branch of "affective computing," which attempts to make computers recognize and respond to users' emotions. And then there's "culturally embedded computing," as Cornell University information science professor Phoebe Sengers calls it, which applies a twist to the concept. "We are shifting from the idea that affective computing is about computers understanding emotions to thinking about how people can understand their own emotions better after interacting with computational devices," says Sengers.

The notions of ambiguity and simplicity are being tested in a house in North London, where a prototype system called Smart Home will develop a sense of a home's emotional climate and present its observations to the family in a daily "horoscope." Input comes from "shy sensors" that don't directly track movements and activities -- which many people find intrusive. Instead, they collect indirect clues about daily living patterns, such as the positions of doors and light switches, water flows and sound levels. The project, a collaboration between the University of London's Goldsmiths College and Cornell, is funded by Intel Corp. and the National Science Foundation.

"The notion of the 'horoscope' is to give people a prompt to reflect on the well-being in their home -- whether people are getting along, whether they are busy," says William Gaver, a professor of design at Goldsmiths. "It might say, 'You've been very busy lately; you should think about taking some time off.'" The system will often be wrong, acknowledges Gaver. Maybe you weren't that busy; you just left the light in the study on all night. But it will be right often enough to get users' attention. "It's not clear we are trying to be 'useful' in a very direct sense," he says. "We are trying to be more thought-provoking. The idea is to shift the center of interpretation and reflection from the system to the user."

Low-bandwidth love

Meanwhile, Cornell graduate student Joseph Kaye has taken the concepts of simplicity and ambiguity even further in an experiment he calls "intimacy one bit at a time." The idea is that meaningful interactions between geographically split couples can occur with minimal communication.