Understanding Context to Capture when Reconstructing Meaningful Spaces for Remote Instruction and Connecting in XR

Recent technological advances are enabling HCI researchers to explore interaction possibilities for remote XR collaboration using high-fidelity reconstructions of physical activity spaces. However, creating these reconstructions often lacks user involvement with an overt focus on capturing sensory context that does not necessarily augment an informal social experience. This work seeks to understand social context that can be important for reconstruction to enable XR applications for informal instructional scenarios. Our study involved the evaluation of an XR remote guidance prototype by 8 intergenerational groups of closely related gardeners using reconstructions of personally meaningful spaces in their gardens. Our findings contextualize physical objects and areas with various motivations related to gardening and detail perceptions of XR that might affect the use of reconstructions for remote interaction. We discuss implications for user involvement to create reconstructions that better translate real-world experience, encourage reflection, incorporate privacy considerations, and preserve shared experiences with XR as a medium for informal intergenerational activities.Comment: 26 pages, 5 figures, 4 table

Crafting a Narrative Inheritance: An HCI Design Framework for Family Memory

This dissertation describes a research agenda for designing technologies to support and enhance intergenerational family memory. I employ an interpretivist, mixed methods approach combining ethnographic inquiry and research-through-design to understand the practices and values enacted in this context. These insights are linked to design through the concept of a narrative inheritance. Narrative inheritance frames family memory as a collective accomplishment among family members, both a negotiated process and a mediated product continually reconstructed across generations. To consider the implications of this negotiation and mediation for design, I include an analysis of three “wicked problems” facing those who seek to pass on family memories across generations: anticipating future audiences, curating large-scale collections, and negotiating dissonant values across many family members. The problems highlight the sociotechnical nature of family memory and values at work that influence design decisions and outcomes. This work includes three studies employing ethnographic methods to investigate cross-generational memory sharing practices, focusing especially on the crafting of family stories and the challenges of managing the mementos and heirlooms which mediate family memory. The concluding two studies employ design prototypes as generative artifacts to elucidate and work out the socio-technical values and tensions which become embedded in design for intergenerational family memory. The insights gained from the ethnographic and design work in this thesis will help designers better understand the accomplishment of family memory in light of complex “wicked” problems, leading to more nuanced and engaging designs for real-world use. The work presented in this dissertation makes the following contributions: 1) Identifies the practices enacted by families sharing memories with future generations, especially navigating mediation dilemmas, 2) Develops an understanding of how recipients of shared family memories respond to and interpret incompleteness (of narratives) and overabundance (of artifacts), 3) Explores the design space of collective, multi-lifespan systems for passing on a family’s “narrative inheritance” 4) Develops a design framework for technologies for a “narrative inheritance” that helps designers identify and navigates the multiple consonant and dissonant values of intergenerational family memory.PHDInformationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/140877/1/jazzij_1.pd

Mixed Reality Storytelling for Social Engagement with Older Adults

Aging is a natural process that brings social and physical challenges among adults, due to which they have to make shifts in habits and routines. Adults belonging to an older age group lose touch with people which provides an opportunity for researchers to think and implement novel ways to engage the population with their loved ones. The advent of technology within the Mixed Reality (MR) space aims to facilitate diverse groups of people to engage in immersive and interactive ways, opening possibilities to address the predicament of aging in an isolated environment. Utilizing participatory design in a virtual setting, inclusive design frameworks and design thinking practices, the contributions of this research are to present the broad concepts of storytelling, social engagement and Mixed Reality existing in the literature, and then take inspiration to co-design a Mixed Reality storytelling system with older adults and their friends & family for the purpose of cultivating meaningful social connections through sharing stories

Digital life stories: Semi-automatic (auto)biographies within lifelog collections

Our life stories enable us to reflect upon and share our personal histories. Through emerging digital technologies the possibility of collecting life experiences digitally is increasingly feasible; consequently so is the potential to create a digital counterpart to our personal narratives. In this work, lifelogging tools are used to collect digital artifacts continuously and passively throughout our day. These include images, documents, emails and webpages accessed; texts messages and mobile activity. This range of data when brought together is known as a lifelog. Given the complexity, volume and multimodal nature of such collections, it is clear that there are significant challenges to be addressed in order to achieve coherent and meaningful digital narratives of our events from our life histories. This work investigates the construction of personal digital narratives from lifelog collections. It examines the underlying questions, issues and challenges relating to construction of personal digital narratives from lifelogs. Fundamentally, it addresses how to organize and transform data sampled from an individual’s day-to-day activities into a coherent narrative account. This enquiry is enabled by three 20-month long-term lifelogs collected by participants and produces a narrative system which enables the semi-automatic construction of digital stories from lifelog content. Inspired by probative studies conducted into current practices of curation, from which a set of fundamental requirements are established, this solution employs a 2-dimensional spatial framework for storytelling. It delivers integrated support for the structuring of lifelog content and its distillation into storyform through information retrieval approaches. We describe and contribute flexible algorithmic approaches to achieve both. Finally, this research inquiry yields qualitative and quantitative insights into such digital narratives and their generation, composition and construction. The opportunities for such personal narrative accounts to enable recollection, reminiscence and reflection with the collection owners are established and its benefit in sharing past personal experience experiences is outlined. Finally, in a novel investigation with motivated third parties we demonstrate the opportunities such narrative accounts may have beyond the scope of the collection owner in: personal, societal and cultural explorations, artistic endeavours and as a generational heirloom

Museum, memories and digital stories : A liminal space for human computer interaction.

Objects, material or digital, mediate memories: they act as anchors in between temporal notions and relations of past and present. Through those objects of memory, the act of remembering occurs neither completely relived in the mind, nor fully captured in the medium. Essential to personal memories, objects represent also our collective memory and capture our social history.The papers submitted for this PhD by selected publications look at the design of innovative technology that can make remembering more evocative and affective. They look at both museums, where digital and material are combined in an augmented reality, and personal/family contexts, where the home and mundane objects can be technologically enhanced to encapsulate digital memories.The museum was ideal to experiment with hybrid settings that combine material (the collection and the architectural space) and digital (the information) (papers 1 to 3). Personalization of information was used to augment the reality of rooms and exhibits: whole body interaction (i.e. physical movements in the space) was used to select and personalize the content and engage visitors with both material (the object) and digital (the information). Although the mobile technology is dated, these papers show the value of combining digital and physical to provide a holistic experience that made visitors wonder. Where the fusion occurs, however, is in the digital technology. To balance this perspective, paper 4 looks at the effect of taking the digital content out into the exhibition space. My recent research (papers 5-9) looks at objects of memory in the personal realm, in particular in the family home. Starting from observing the role and function of mementos, I conclude that a more holistic and organic approach has to be taken to make personal digital objects of memory more present in people's life. Materialization can be achieved with digital devices designed for individual and family use, so that the product fits with the mundane aspects of life, is immediate, and stimulates affect, not efficiency.Finally papers 10 and 11 provide evidence of the innovative methodologies I have developed and successfully used in iterative user studies and evaluations across different research projects and many years of research. As a whole this submission shows that there is a huge design space to explore in looking at how technology could be used in public or private spaces to bring together the two aspects of memory: remembering in the mind and capturing through objects, in order to preserve our digital life as tangible interactive objects