Digital Possessions in the Museum of Broken Relationships

This paper describes an interactive demo of our collaborative research activity with the Museum of Broken Relationships, one of Lonely Planet’s’Fifty Museums to Blow Your Mind’. In collaboration with the Museum, we are currently collecting data worldwide and cross-culturally on the digital possessions individuals associate with their romantic break up, combined with the stories behind those possessions. Taking a methodologically innovative approach, we adapt the Museum’s existing practices to conduct research (triangulating existing small-scale interview data) whilst simultaneously generating a new collection for the Museum. In doing so, we foreground contemporary HCI questions of ownership, curation, and presentation of self after a romantic breakup to the public. The demo will exhibit the digital possessions and associated stories that we collect, whilst also giving the CHI community the opportunity to contribute to the collection in real-time at the conference, by sharing digital possessions and stories of their own romantic breakups

AutoTopography: what can physical mementos tell us about digital memories?

Current technology makes it possible to capture huge amounts of information related to everyday experiences. Despite this, we know little about the processes by which people identify and manage mementos - objects which are directly meaningful to their memories. Among the millions of objects people encounter in a lifetime, few become such reminders of people, places or events. We report fieldwork where participants gave us a tour of their homes describing how and why particular objects become mementos. Our findings extend the existing digital memory literature; first our participants didn't view their activities as experiential 'capture', nor were mementos limited to pictorial representations of people and events; instead they included everyday objects. Furthermore, mementos were not only displayed and shared, but also integrated into everyday activities. Finally there were complex relations between house location and memento type. We discuss the theoretical and technical implications of our work

Materialising Memories: Design Research to Support Remembering

Not available

A Broken Record

This Culminating Experience project is a collaboration with the Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb, where people donate mundane objects from their previous relationships in order to make peace with the past and tell their story. ‘A Broken Record’ is an album of original of music and visual compositions inspired by the objects in the Museum’s collection. This album will take the form of an interactive, user-defined audio- visual experience where each listener chooses their own unique adventure through the album depending on their answers to a series of yes/no questions relating to their own experience of love and loss. Each answer presents the listener with a different digital audio-visual experience where they hear a song and view a lyric video featuring the object from which the song drew its inspiration. Listeners will only interact with the songs and stories that resemble previous relationships they have had, resulting in a personalised heartbreak soundtrack.https://remix.berklee.edu/graduate-studies-production-technology/1212/thumbnail.jp

Materials Matter: An Exploration of the Curatorial Practices of Consumers as Collectors

Structured Abstract Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine the interplay between the curatorial practices of consumers as collectors and the materiality of the collected objects. In particular, this study explores how the material substances of collected objects shapes curatorial practices and how the ongoing use of the collected objects challenges curatorial practices. Methodology/approach Taking advantage of the publicization of once-private collections on social media, we collect 111 YouTube videos created by plastic shoe aficionados. Drawing from visual anthropology and theorizations of materiality, we analyze consumer interactions with the objects they collect. Findings This study’s findings elucidate consumers’ interactions with the material substances of the objects they collect and demonstrate how these interactions shape the ways in which consumers curate their collections, including how they wear, care for, catalog, and display the collected objects. Research implications Our findings have implications for theorization on consumer collections, consumer identity, and consumer participation in brand communities and are relevant for consumer researchers who study the interactions and relationships between consumers and consumption objects. Originality/value of paper This study is the first to re-examine consumers as collectors to extend and update consumer research on the curatorial practices of physical, wearable collectibles. This study sets the foundations for further research to advance our understanding of consumers as collectors as well as to illuminate other theories and aspects of consumer research that consider consumer– object interactions

The Preservation of Memory

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/69287/1/ktkuehl_1271831161_IPThesis_KatharineKuehl.pd

Family memories in the home: contrasting physical and digital mementos

We carried out fieldwork to characterise and compare physical and digital mementos in the home. Physical mementos are highly valued, heterogeneous and support different types of recollection. Contrary to expectations, we found physical mementos are not purely representational, and can involve appropriating common objects and more idiosyncratic forms. In contrast, digital mementos were initially perceived as less valuable, although participants later reconsidered this. Digital mementos were somewhat limited in function and expression, largely involving representational photos and videos, and infrequently accessed. We explain these digital limitations and conclude with design guidelines for digital mementos, including better techniques for accessing and integrating these into everyday life, allowing them to acquire the symbolic associations and lasting value that characterise their physical counterparts

Collection Ontogenesis: Following the Nascence and Maturation of the Montgomery Place Archive, 1802 - 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of in Art History at Bard College

Material Culture and (Forced) Migration: Materializing the transient

Material Culture and (Forced) Migration argues that materiality is a fundamental dimension of migration. During journeys of migration, people take things with them, or they lose, find and engage things along the way. Movements themselves are framed by objects such as borders, passports, tents, camp infrastructures, boats and mobile phones. This volume brings together chapters that are based on research into a broad range of movements – from the study of forced migration and displacement to the analysis of retirement migration. What ties the chapters together is the perspective of material culture and an understanding of materiality that does not reduce objects to mere symbols. Centring on four interconnected themes – temporality and materiality, methods of object-based migration research, the affective capacities of objects, and the engagement of things in place-making practices – the volume provides a material culture perspective for migration scholars around the globe, representing disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, contemporary archaeology, curatorial studies, history and human geography. The ethnographic nature of the chapters and the focus on everyday objects and practices will appeal to all those interested in the broader conditions and tangible experiences of migration