This is the idea behind the Ambient Orb, which glows different colours depending on different variables. So it could glow red if the stockmarket was falling. Once you'd gotten used to the device, you wouldn't even notice it was there, it would just be sitting there quietly white or green in the corner of your eye. Then one day it glows red and suddenly you become really aware of it: you're losing money!

What I really love about the Ambient Orb is that it takes advantage of its presence in a physical world to do things I've been complaining are hard online. Other people nearby can tell if you're looking at it, there's a visibility of use. You can catch it in your peripheral vision, take it for granted, and never really focus on it until you see it's red.

I think what's missing from it is an aspect of how we process complex data normally. It doesn't have an aspect of "look closer", you know, you don't examine harder it to get a better representation of the stockmarket.

It's the same with the Dangling String, which is a device that hangs in your peripheral vision, a piece of string hanging from the ceiling, and it jiggles about the more network traffic there is on your local network. It's a terrific example of what Mark Weiser, the father of ubiquitous computing, calls "calm technology". In fact, I think this kind of calm technology is the future of public computing in general. But let's say it's jiggling really badly one day and you want to see what's going on -- so you look really close, but what do you see? Just more string!

That 'look closer' bit is missing. What we're finding with these new supersenses - the Ambient Orb, Dangling String and Montage - is that we can't use our normal computer-world metaphors of objects-and-messages to approximate how human beings really work. How we actually use our senses, not just looking and hearing but our social senses too.

That is, before now we could think about the *email* and the *email client* as being separate things. We didn't have to consider what it really means for one person to send an email to another person, not in the social sense. It's all abstraction layers, afterall. An email client receives an email: why should the program care who it's from, whether it was expected or not? They're orthogonal issues, surely?

Well what we're finding is that with small groups the abstraction layers break down. From a design perspective we can't just think about discrete events, we have to enable [garden] the dynamics processes of ongoing communication too. And that's part of the second big trend.