I just dug out my old Audrey, a com­put­er appli­ance designed for the home released in 2000 and then canned in 2001. What a shame to think a device with such thought­ful­ly designed soft­ware and hard­ware was so quick­ly rel­e­gat­ed to the dust-pile of e‑history. Any­way, see­ing Audrey remind­ed me Lau­rel Swan and I pre­sent­ed a paper on Audrey at 4S in 2005 titled “Audrey, Any­one?” The abstract is below. We did man­age to inter­view some of the orig­i­nal design­ers on the team includ­ing Ray Win­ninger. How­ev­er, things got the bet­ter of us and we nev­er wrote it up in fin­ished form. Here’s the abstract we wrote:

Billed as the first dig­i­tal home assis­tant, Audrey was released in Novem­ber 2000. Joint­ly designed by the famed design firm, IDEO, and the tech industry’s then flavour of the month, 3COM, Audrey was praised for its indus­tri­al design and inno­v­a­tive appli­ance-like approach to home com­put­ing. Six months lat­er, Audrey was on her way to the prover­bial glue factory.

Named, some­what incon­gru­ous­ly, after Audrey Hep­burn, the domes­tic appli­ance was con­ceived in response to the heavy­weight com­put­ing par­a­digm preva­lent in the day. The premise was a com­put­er designed for the home; a sim­pli­fied device with lim­it­ed input mech­a­nisms, a basic fea­ture set and a soft­ened aes­thet­ic (avail­able in five ‘kitchen match­ing’ colours: mead­ow, linen, ocean, slate and sunshine).
Inter­leav­ing inter­view tran­scripts record­ed with two of Audrey’s design team with writ­ten mate­ri­als avail­able on the appli­ance, we con­sid­er why a tech­nol­o­gy failed that on the face of it was thought­ful­ly designed and strate­gi­cal­ly tar­get­ed. Self-reflec­tion from the design­ers will be set against the hyper­bole sur­round­ing the product’s release and its cult sta­tus achieved in sub­se­quent­ly spawned online forums. Over­all, the col­lect­ed mate­ri­als will be amassed to crit­i­cal­ly reflect on the sud­den demise of Audrey. Giv­en the lessons learnt from Audrey’s his­to­ry, thought will also be giv­en to whether it may be time to revis­it the idea of an infor­ma­tion appli­ance for the home and what form this appli­ance might take.