Research issues surrounding the development and design of interactive technologies for home are discussed in the Special Issue of Personal Technologies. Liechti and Ichikawa's paper provides an overview of the mainstream literature on computer mediated communications (CMC), literature which derives mainly from the CHI and CSCW communities. It also reports on an instantiation of the kind of multimedia applications that would seem a logical output from that literature. Rose and Kroff offer an analysis of how the logic of the same sort can be applied to hitherto noninteractive technology in home settings, namely music reproduction. Here they show how innovative interfaces can allow much. Hughes and co-researchers consider the problem of how to describe home environments. They worry about how to do service to the richness of domestic life while at the same time providing sufficient abstraction to allow design thinking.