As tools for everyday life, today's PCs are hopelessly complex and clunky, Donald Norman argued in his recent book The Invisible Computer (reviewed in TR, September/October 1998). For those of us frequently exasperated by our own computers, Norman's book offered comforting validation. It also offered a tantalizing solution: Make computing ubiquitous, by replacing PCs with networks of small, dedicated "information appliances." Yet many of the appliances Norman proposed as examples, such as the "home financial center" that pays bills electronically and communicates with the checkbook appliance and the credit card appliance, sounded just as complicated as the computers they were intended to replace.

Physicist Neil Gershenfeld, co-director of the MIT Media Lab's Things That Think (TTT) consortium, rescues Norman's concept by making a crucial addition. If computers are going to be ubiquitous, he argues in When Things Start to Think, they had also better be unobtrusive. The researchers in Gershenfeld's consortium study ways to make computers truly invisible, by embedding them in traditional household objects-from coffee mugs to cardigans-that we all know how to use.