FM radio: family interplay with sonic mementos

Digital mementos are increasingly problematic, as people acquire large amounts of digital belongings that are hard to access and often forgotten. Based on fieldwork with 10 families, we designed a new type of embodied digital memento, the FM Radio. It allows families to access and play sonic mementos of their previous holidays. We describe our underlying design motivation where recordings are presented as a series of channels on an old fashioned radio. User feedback suggests that the device met our design goals: being playful and intriguing, easy to use and social. It facilitated family interaction, and allowed ready access to mementos, thus sharing many of the properties of physical mementos that we intended to trigger

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

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

Augmenting human memory using personal lifelogs

Memory is a key human facility to support life activities, including social interactions, life management and problem solving. Unfortunately, our memory is not perfect. Normal individuals will have occasional memory problems which can be frustrating, while those with memory impairments can often experience a greatly reduced quality of life. Augmenting memory has the potential to make normal individuals more effective, and those with significant memory problems to have a higher general quality of life. Current technologies are now making it possible to automatically capture and store daily life experiences over an extended period, potentially even over a lifetime. This type of data collection, often referred to as a personal life log (PLL), can include data such as continuously captured pictures or videos from a first person perspective, scanned copies of archival material such as books, electronic documents read or created, and emails and SMS messages sent and received, along with context data of time of capture and access and location via GPS sensors. PLLs offer the potential for memory augmentation. Existing work on PLLs has focused on the technologies of data capture and retrieval, but little work has been done to explore how these captured data and retrieval techniques can be applied to actual use by normal people in supporting their memory. In this paper, we explore the needs for augmenting human memory from normal people based on the psychology literature on mechanisms about memory problems, and discuss the possible functions that PLLs can provide to support these memory augmentation needs. Based on this, we also suggest guidelines for data for capture, retrieval needs and computer-based interface design. Finally we introduce our work-in-process prototype PLL search system in the iCLIPS project to give an example of augmenting human memory with PLLs and computer based interfaces

Amarcordi, tangible memory cues for personal stories

Personal memories shape individuals’ identities and inform their decisions. Since the beginning of time, technology has been used to aid human’s natural recall capabilities. The tools which are used to record them, have inevitably shaped and influenced not only how people remember, but also what they save. Digital media have provided great opportunities and power of handling personal memory collections, but have also introduced several controversies. The accumulation of huge unsorted digital archives is becoming inevitable: selecting pictures and files is now work rather than pleasure. Companies are starting to address this issue with new products and features, but this raises the question whether something so important as memories should be left in the hands of private corporations. This thesis addresses the need to find motivation to curate memories from my past with a personal and artistic approach. It argues the importance of defining a strong objective to encourage such hard work. I achieved this through the realization of a physical and interactive project: Amarcordi. It consists in modular magnetic embroideries, each one representing a cherished story from my past. The visual and tactile language I designed represents not only people and facts, but also emotions and moods. Findings show the effectiveness of the project in inspiring me to recollect and reflect, giving me the opportunity to look at events through different perspectives. A surprising benefit was also creating an innovative way to share those cherished moments with dear ones

Creating stories for reflection from multimodal lifelog content: An initial investigation

Using lifelogging tools, digital artifacts can be collected continuously and passively throughout our day. These may include a stream of images recorded passively using tools such as the Microsoft SenseCam; documents, emails and webpages accessed; texts messages and mobile activity; and context sensing to uncover the current location and proximal individuals. The wealth of information such an archive contains on our personal life history provides us with the opportunity to review, reflect and reminisce upon our past experience. However, the complexity, volume and multimodal nature of such collections creates a barrier to such activities. We are currently exploring the potential of digital narratives formed from these collections as a means to overcome these challenges. By successfully reducing the content to that most appropriate to the story, and by then presenting it in a coherent and usable manner, we can hope to better enable reflection. The means by which content reduction and presentation should occur is investigated through card sorting activities and probe sessions which nine participants engaged in. The initial results are discussed, as well as the opportunity, as seen in these sessions, for lifelog-based stories to provide utility in personal reflection and reminiscence

Evocative computing – creating meaningful lasting experiences in connecting with the past

We present an approach – evocative computing – that demonstrates how ‘at hand’ technologies can be ‘picked up’ and used by people to create meaningful and lasting experiences, through connecting and interacting with the past. The approach is instantiated here through a suite of interactive technologies configured for an indoor-outdoor setting that enables groups to explore, discover and research the history and background of a public cemetery. We report on a two-part study where different groups visited the cemetery and interacted with the digital tools and resources. During their activities serendipitous uses of the technology led to connections being made between personal memo-ries and ongoing activities. Furthermore, these experiences were found to be long-lasting; a follow-up study, one year later, showed them to be highly memorable, and in some cases leading participants to take up new directions in their work. We discuss the value of evocative computing for enriching user experiences and engagement with heritage practices

Making history: intentional capture of future memories

Lifelogging' technology makes it possible to amass digital data about every aspect of our everyday lives. Instead of focusing on such technical possibilities, here we investigate the way people compose long-term mnemonic representations of their lives. We asked 10 families to create a time capsule, a collection of objects used to trigger remembering in the distant future. Our results show that contrary to the lifelogging view, people are less interested in exhaustively digitally recording their past than in reconstructing it from carefully selected cues that are often physical objects. Time capsules were highly expressive and personal, many objects were made explicitly for inclusion, however with little object annotation. We use these findings to propose principles for designing technology that supports the active reconstruction of our future past

Tangible user interfaces : past, present and future directions

In the last two decades, Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) have emerged as a new interface type that interlinks the digital and physical worlds. Drawing upon users' knowledge and skills of interaction with the real non-digital world, TUIs show a potential to enhance the way in which people interact with and leverage digital information. However, TUI research is still in its infancy and extensive research is required in or- der to fully understand the implications of tangible user interfaces, to develop technologies that further bridge the digital and the physical, and to guide TUI design with empirical knowledge. This paper examines the existing body of work on Tangible User In- terfaces. We start by sketching the history of tangible user interfaces, examining the intellectual origins of this field. We then present TUIs in a broader context, survey application domains, and review frame- works and taxonomies. We also discuss conceptual foundations of TUIs including perspectives from cognitive sciences, phycology, and philoso- phy. Methods and technologies for designing, building, and evaluating TUIs are also addressed. Finally, we discuss the strengths and limita- tions of TUIs and chart directions for future research