“Wise Things”: When smart objects stimulate reflection.

Despite a variety of purposes for designing Smart Objects (SOs), the design of such artifacts with the purpose of evoking people’s thoughts and reflection on complex issues (e.g. environmental and societal) is still little explored. In fact, the ability of SOs to collect information and recall them in a right way and time about people’s behaviors, helps them to reflect on the consequences. As an attempt, this paper introduces the concept of Wise Thing as a category of such smart objects, with augmented properties of being Deliberative, Reflectional, Experiential, and Communicative.