Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin's "Software, Objects and Home Space" (a thirty-four page PDF) outlines a taxonomy of "coded domestic objects". A "logject" is basically a domestic object (ranging from mobile phone to a heating/cooling system or a vacuum cleaner) that is

(1) uniquely indexical, (2) has awareness of its environment and is able to respond to changes in that environment that are meaningful within its functional context, (3) traces and tracks its own usage in time and/or space, (4) records that history, (5) can communicate that history across a network for analysis and use by other agents (objects and people), (6) can use the data it produces to undertake what Dodge and Kitchin (2007a) term ‘automated management’ – automated, automatic and autonomous decisions and actions in the world without human oversight and to effect change through the ‘consequences of their assertions’ (Bleecker 2006: 9); and (7) is programmable and thus mutable to some degree (that is, it is possible to adjust settings, update parameters and to download new firmware6). Logjects then enable the kinds of unobtrusive machine-to-machine, machine-to-person and person-to-machine exchanges that are a fundamental trait of pervasive computing and are diverse in their nature. We can identify two main classes of logject: impermeable and permeable.

[via Pasta&Vinegar]