"In the present, shoes can blink. In the future, shoes will think." This little ditty is hummed a lot by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab in Boston these days. That's because the MIT Media Lab, which has pioneered the concept of multimedia for the past 10 years, has announced a new focus on some of the more basic things in life: clothes, coffee pots and sneakers. 

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"Just think about the engineered artefacts that we are surrounded by most of the time," says Richard Bolt, senior research scientist at the Media Lab. "We wear clothes, put on jewellery, sit on chairs and walk on carpets that all have the same profound failing: they are blind, deaf and dumb. Cufflinks don't link at all. Glasses help sight, but they don't see. We must expect more from our environment."

The work at the Media Lab is organised through a new research consortium called Things That Think.