Scope
[Image source: composite of illustrations from Home Tweet Home (Wired blogs) and The House that Tweets (Momeld)]
Now here’s Andy Stanford-Clarks house, Andy_house, which was an experiment by a researcher at IBM in the UK last year hooking bits of his house up to Twitter. What does it mean when the energy consumption of our home is legible, legible in a human way, like those Chernoff Faces made baseball stats legible? I love that his house tells him that someone has called. I read also that it sends him a private message of the number that tried to call, so he can call back.
But talk about low barrier to entry! This is the kind of thing, a couple decades ago, that would have been the subject of a big research programme at a huge school. Now it’s a person with an itch and an interest.