Proximity Based Tools that Make Us Smart

Abstract The physicalisation of the information landscape, the fact that people are being more and more mobile in the sense of having constant closeness to the digital information world, and an increased information pressure on people in their everyday life form the starting point for the work that this paper presents. This development concerns the society, both at a technical and a social level. A theoretical platform for studying how people use the environment to become smarter, with its basis in distributed cognition is presented. The paper presents a toolbox with tools aimed to helping people to cope with the increased information pressure. With this toolbox a design space with five dimensions is introduced: access, anchor, proximity, affect, and abstraction.