In this paper we consider how ‘smartness’ should be designed to enhance the communication in the home. We aim to evoke a rethinking of how smart technologies should be embedded in perspectives of user needs. Through a set of experimental studies, which employ a Wizard of Oz (WoZ) as design and evaluation methodology, we observe and analyse user interactions accordingly with the wizard's simulations. Based on experiment results, our argument is, designing smartness for communication in the home should not heavily rely on invisibly distributed sensors and networks due to interaction design misunderstandings that a large number of sensors and networks can make ambient intelligence with few user understandings. The results also argue that, smartness can be realised by first improving the integration of personal information into the environments, which is closely relevant to social routines.