Home Health Horoscope

The Home Health Horoscope prints out a daily, automatically generated “horoscope” for the home that reflects domestic activities. About half a dozen bespoke sensor assemblages were deployed in a house in North London, based on interviews with inhabitants about the patterns of activities in their household. For instance, one monitored the door between the kitchen and living room, because it was only closed during private conversations. Another was situated under an alcove seat in the master bedroom because this is where Zac liked to enjoy an intimate chat with Fru in the morning — if they had time. Representations of how busy, happy, fragmented etc. the home were mapped to hundreds of sentences extracted from newspapers to produce a reading for the day. The idea was to create an “intelligent” system using a genre for predictions that people don’t necessarily believe, thus encouraging people to find their own meanings – much as they do with horoscopes.

Click here for a conference paper about the project.

Date: 2006

---