IKE millions of people who work in offices, Dr. Itiro Siio of Tamagawa University in Tokyo is familiar with the power of coffee that is, its capacity to foster good will among office workers by bringing them together around the coffee machine and encouraging informal conversation.
A computer scientist and a moderate coffee drinker, Dr. Siio came up with the idea of blending coffee with technology in a community-building tool for the workplace. His device, the Meeting Pot, consists of a coffee machine with a heat sensor, wireless transmitter and several scattered units that yield the aroma of coffee.
When someone in the office goes to the lounge and starts making coffee, the transmitter sends a signal to aroma units on workers' desks. Each unit is a glass box containing a sachet of coffee grains and equipped with a tiny fan. Upon receiving the signal, the fan starts blowing air through the sachet, and the inviting smell of coffee drifts out of the box. It is a subtle signal that beckons: "Co- workers are gathering for a break would you like to join in?"
Meeting Pot may sound like a needlessly fancy alternative to poking your head into cubicles and asking who wants to hang out in the coffee room, but the purpose of Dr. Siio's research is more than fanciful. The coffee-aroma generator is one of many displays being developed that are aimed at pleasing the senses while presenting information.
This year Dr. Siio and a research colleague, Dr. Noyuri Mima, tested the Meeting Pot at the Future University of Hakodate in Japan. The aroma displays were installed in five offices. In an four-month experiment, faculty members compared the experience of being notified of coffee-making activity through the aroma display with that of receiving e-mail with a link to a Web page showing a steaming mug.
"Most of the subjects preferred aroma to e-mail," said Dr. Siio, currently a visiting scholar at Georgia Tech, where the meeting pot is on display in the kitchen of the university's experimental Aware Home. "Some of them responded to the aroma by going out for a smoke or by simply joining co-workers chatting in the hallway."
Dr. Mima, a professor of system information science at Future University, said that the smell of coffee seemed to serve as a trigger for informal communication, possibly because of the cultural meaning associated with coffee in everyday life.
As computing makes inroads into the home and the office, spinning an ever more complex web around the user, scientists say, there will be an increasing need for ambient displays like the aroma generator to make the technology feel more pleasant.
"We are rapidly headed to a world where every person uses dozens of things with computation and communications capability in them," said Dr. Scott Hudson, an associate professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. "Information overload threatens to gobble up all of our attention."
A central theme in the development of "calm" technology is to shift information from the center of a user's attention to the fringes, allowing the person to deal with information at a pace and at a moment that he or she is comfortable with. This goes hand in hand with presenting information in a manner that relaxes the user's senses.
The continuing decline in the cost of computer technologies could lead to creative displays that double as art objects. Dr. Hudson pointed to the Information Percolator, a decorative display that he designed with colleagues that consists of a series of glass tubes filled with water. Electronic microcontrollers at the base of the tubes release tiny air bubbles; as they rise through the water, the bubbles act as floating pixels, forming a fuzzy and dynamic image that presents textual information. Dr. Hudson envisions the Information Percolator's being used as a decorative installation in places like airports and hotel lobbies to display flight times and room availability.
Ambient (news/quote) displays can strikingly change people's awareness of and experience of information, said Dr. Hiroshi Ishii, a researcher at the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. One of his creations is made of computer-controlled pinwheels suspended from a ceiling. They spin in different ways to depict different kinds of information, from the frenzy of stock transactions to e-mail traffic at M.I.T.
"Imagine an ambient display that can generate hundreds of aromas," Dr. Ishii said, extending the concept of the Meeting Pot. "You could map a variety of activities in cyberspace to one aroma or a combination of many. The user could be made to feel as if he were actually surrounded by the ether of information."
