“Ambient Media” are a fundamentally new way how to define media in the ubiquitous era, and are contribute to the field of human-computer-interaction (HCI), computer science, experience design, media management, and media studies. Ambient Media have been defined, explored, and conceptualized in [2–5, 10]. This special issue devotes to the exploration of phenomena of ambient media, in particular on aspects of search and retrieval, interactive interfaces, designing experiences, applying new interaction concepts, the design of experiences, educational issues, and the future prospective of this novel media form. For this special issue, we accepted six papers exploring these issues.

A very special feature of this special issue is, that the contributing authors collaboratively worked on the analysis of the containing articles. This article shall give a holistic overview of the current status of Ambient Media, and outlines its potential future till 2020. The paper contributed by A. Scherp contributes with the aspect of search of open social media data via mobile phones. Interactive user interfaces are explored by M. Golja in his work, and particularly addresses the design of interfaces for digital interactive TV and their limitations. New learning strategies, and especially how libraries transform from their analogue to their digital counterpart has been explored by M. Bilandzic. Experience as a phenomena in social living contexts as e.g. at home, has been explored by D. Obal, who devoted his research to the exploration of how to design these in a kitchen environment. “Design Thinking” as method for educating students has been explored in the contribution by A. Lugmayr, who discusses the applicability of this method in media education. Ambient media in the context of personalized services in a ubiquitous environment have been contributed by E. Serral-Asensio, and enrich the special issue by a more practical and service viewpoint. Last but not least, J. Guna contributed with a novel interaction methodology based on user identification on gestures. The range of the articles within this special issue is rather wide, but covers a wide range of aspects of ambient media which will interest a wide reader audience.

We would like to pinpoint the reader to other relevant resources, as e.g. undertaken by the International Ambient Media Association (iAMEA) [1] and their open access online series entitled “International Series on Information Systems and Management in Creative eMedia” on [3, 4]. We also would like to emphasize our workshop series, the Semantic Ambient Media Series (SAME) (see e.g. [9] or [7]) and the Nokia Ubimedia MindTrek Award (see http://www.mindtrek.org/ubimedia). We hope to give the reader new perspectives on this newly emerging field.