The advent of embedded processors with built-in wireless transceivers offers a number of chances to revolutionize both communications and computation. We use the term smart space to refer to the environment created by a cluster of these wireless-connected processors. At BBN we are investigating the problems of using smart spaces to revolutionize the office environment.
We chose to focus on the office environment for three reasons. First, the overall goal is clear: to enable an office worker to work more effectively with whatever electronic tools are in proximity to him or her. Smart spaces must make work easier (or more straightforward) than current systems or they will not succeed in the office environment.
The second reason for our focus on the office is that it clarifies the role of the Internet. The Internet is one office tool among many; a very important tool, but not the only one. Leslie Lamport once said, ``A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable,'' [Lamport]. Businesses spend a lot of money to try to avoid this kind of scenario. At the same time, the profusion of devices in a smart space means the likelihood that some device will fail is high.
The Internet will not always be accessible to a smart space. For example, even users of today's low speed cellular phone networks periodically suffer poor signal quality. So our goal is to create smart spaces that can capitalize on the Internet's resources, when available, but still allow users to work productively when the Internet is not available. A corollary is that Internet access should not be required to complete a purely local transaction.
The third reason to focus on the office is that, being office workers ourselves, we can try to live in the smart spaces we build. Living a vision is a very effective way to find mistakes and identify unexpected benefits.
In the rest of this paper we present what we believe are the key challenges to incorporating smart spaces into the office and then discuss potential solutions that we are exploring to two of those challenges.