Special issue of personal and ubiquitous computing: papers from 3AD—the second international conference on appliance design

Abstract

This issue of personal and ubiquitous computing contains papers presented at 3AD—the third international conference on appliance design, which was held at HP Laboratories, Bristol, UK on 28–29 June 2005. As with the first two conferences in the series—1AD held in May 2003 and 2AD in May 2004—the aim of the conference was to explore the new discipline of product design that cuts the historical ties from desktops, PDAs and web pages to create a set of principles for radically simple information appliances. The AD conferences have started a dialogue between appliance design disciplines—including product and industrial design, information design, interaction design, technology innovation and research in human-centred studies—which will help those disciplines re-establish themselves in a new context and so drive forward innovation in an industry where users will increasingly assert their demand for products that fit into their daily lifestyles. As a consequence, a new discipline of appliance design is developing, which blends all the perspectives of physical, functional, interactive, graphical, and information design, and it is this discipline that the contributions to the conference set out to explore. Last year we included only the full papers from the conference, but in this issue we have included all contributions. The issue is divided into three parts. The first seven contributions are the full papers presented at the conference, plus the design colloquium presented by Pieter Jan Stappers. The second set of contributions is the ten short Appliance Bazaar papers, which describe specific appliance prototypes, concepts or research studies. Finally, we have included the design prospectuses for the nine entries to the 3AD international design competition which was held at the conference. We have included full papers, Appliance Bazaar papers and Design Competition entries, as we would like a much wider audience to take a look at 3AD even if they were unable to come along. We thus hope that the dialogue started between participants at the event can be extended out in new and interesting directions.