Data craft: integrating data into daily practices and shared reflections

We explore data craft as a means to create mementos that integrate data about personal and shared experiences into people’s everyday lives. Digital mementos, e.g., in form of visualizations, aim to support personal and joint reminiscing by leveraging personal data archives. However, their digital nature can complicate value construction and integration with social and everyday practices. We propose to consider data craft—the manual crafting of functional objects that incorporate personal visualizations—as an opportunity to create meaningful physical objects. We suggest that the manual creation and habitual use of these objects adds to their perceived value and authenticity and can spark recollection based on digital traces of personal and shared experiences. We illustrate the concept of data craft through examples and reflect on the resulting objects as keepsakes and gifts that strengthen social relationships.PostprintPeer reviewe

The cue is key: Design for real-life remembering

This paper aims to put the memory cue in the spotlight. We show how memory cues are incorporated in the area of interaction design. The focus is on external memory cues - cues that exist outside the human mind but have an internal effect on memory reconstruction. Examples of external cues include people, environments, and things, where the latter are most relevant for the aim of this paper since these cues can be incorporated in designs. This paper makes a dual contribution to research: (1) it provides insights into how memory research informs the design of devices to facilitate personal memory recall; and (2) by taking a design perspective, it raises questions about memory cues as part of real-life remembering to inform psychological memory research. Since memory theory inspires design and both fields would benefit from collaboration, we would like these questions to be an inspiration for future memory research, in particular targeting external memory cues. © 2014 Hogrefe Publishing

Remembering today tomorrow: exploring the human-centred design of digital mementos

This paper describes two-part research exploring the context for and human-centred design of ‘digital mementos’, as an example of technology for reflection on personal experience(in this case, autobiographical memories). Field studies into families’ use of physical and digital objects for remembering provided a rich understanding of associated user needs and human values, and suggested properties for ‘digital mementos’ such as being ‘not like work’, discoverable and fun. In a subsequent design study, artefacts were devised to express these features and develop the understanding of needs and values further via discussion with groups of potential ‘users’. ‘Critical artefacts’(the products of Critical Design)were used to enable participants to envisage broader possibilities for social practices and applications of technology in the context of personal remembering, and thus to engage in the design of novel devices and systems relevant to their lives. Reflection was a common theme in the work, being what the digital mementos were designed to afford and the mechanism by which the design activity progressed. Ideas for digital mementos formed the output of this research and expressed the designer’s and researcher’s understanding of participants’ practices and needs, and the human values that underlie them and, in doing so, suggest devices and systems that go beyond usability to support a broader conception of human activity

An internet of old things as an augmented memory system

The interdisciplinary Tales of Things and electronic Memory (TOTeM) project investigates new contexts for augmenting things with stories in the emerging culture of the Internet of Things (IoT). Tales of Things is a tagging system which, based on two-dimensional barcodes (also called Quick Response or QR codes) and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, enables the capturing and sharing of object stories and the physical linking to objects via read and writable tags. Within the context of our study, it has functioned as a technology probe which we employed with the aim to stimulate discussion and identify desire lines that point to novel design opportunities for the engagement with personal and social memories linked to everyday objects. In this paper, we discuss results from fieldwork with different community groups in the course of which seemingly any object could form the basis of a meaningful story and act as entry point into rich inherent 'networks of meaning'. Such networks of meaning are often solely accessible for the owner of an object and are at risk of getting lost as time goes by. We discuss the different discourses that are inherent in these object stories and provide avenues for making these memories and meaning networks accessible and shareable. This paper critically reflects on Tales of Things as an example of an augmented memory system and discusses possible wider implications for the design of related systems. © 2011 Springer-Verlag London Limited

Designing for interaction immediacy to enhance social skills of children with autism

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder often require therapeutic interventions to support engagement in effective social interactions. In this paper, we present the results of a study conducted in three public schools that use an educational and behavioral intervention for the instruction of social skills in changing situational contexts. The results of this study led to the concept of interaction immediacy to help children maintain appropriate spatial boundaries, reply to conversation initiators, disengage appropriately at the end of an interaction, and identify potential communication partners. We describe design principles for Ubicomp technologies to support interaction immediacy and present an example design. The contribution of this work is twofold. First, we present an understanding of social skills in mobile and dynamic contexts. Second, we introduce the concept of interaction immediacy and show its effectiveness as a guiding principle for the design of Ubicomp applications

Using Physical Memorabilia as Opportunities to Move into Collocated Digital Photo Sharing

The uptake of digital photos vs. print photos has altered the practice of photo sharing. Print photos are easy to share within the home, but much harder to share outside of it. The opposite is true of digital photos. People easily share digital photos outside the home, e.g., to family and friends by email gift-giving, and to social networks and the broader public by web publishing. Yet within the home, collocated digital photo sharing is harder, primarily because digital photos are typically stored on personal accounts in desktop computers located in home offices. This leads to several consequences. 1) The invisibility of digital photos implies few opportunities for serendipitous photo sharing. 2) Access control and navigation issues inhibit family members from retrieving photo collections. 3) Photo viewing is compromised as digital photos are displayed on small screens in an uncomfortable viewing setting. To mitigate some of these difficulties, we explore how physical memorabilia collected by family members can create opportunities that encourage social and collocated digital photo sharing. First, we studied (via contextual interviews with 20 households) how families currently practice photo sharing and how they keep memorabilia. We identified classes of memorabilia that can serve as memory triggers to family events, trips, and times when people took photos. Second, we designed SOUVENIRS, a photo-viewing system that exploits memorabilia as a social instrument. Using SOUVENIRS, a family member can meaningfully associate physica

Tangible cooperative gestures: Improving control and initiative in digital photo sharing

© 2015 by the authors. This paper focuses on co-present digital photo sharing on a notebook and investigates how this could be supported. While analyzing the current digital photo sharing situation we noticed that there was a high threshold for visitors to take control of the personal computer of the photo owner, resulting in inequity of participation. It was assumed that visitors would have the opportunity to interact with the notebook more freely if this threshold was lowered by distributing the user interface and creating a more public, instead of personal, interaction space. This, in turn, could make them feel more involved and in control during a session, creating a more enjoyable experience. To test these assumptions a design prototype was created that stimulates participants to use tangible artifacts for cooperative gestures, a promising direction for the future of HCI. The situation with the cooperative gestures was compared with the regular digital photo sharing situation, which makes use of a keyboard. In dyads, visitors felt more involved and in control in the design prototype cooperative gestures condition (especially during storytelling), resulting in a more enjoyable digital photo sharing experience

Photo mementos: designing digital media to represent ourselves at home

We examine photos in the family home as examples of mementos, cherished objects kept in memory of a person or event. In a ‘memory tour’, we asked participants to walk us through their family home selecting and discussing significant mnemonic objects. With each personal narrative we recorded memento location, i.e. the room, place within the room and any nearby objects. Although photos were not the most popular mementos, when chosen they were highly significant, and often unique. These photo mementos were usually not representational but symbolic, where only the owner knows their many layers of meaning. Photos from different times in the person’s life were strategically placed in different rooms. Their location afforded different functions, e.g. photo mementos in family spaces reinforced family bonds, photo mementos in personal spaces were for immersive reminiscing, whereas those in public rooms had an aesthetic value and to spark conversations with visitors. Finally photo mementos were rarely isolated: they were clustered in displayed albums or stored with other memorabilia in boxes or drawers to represent a stage in life. We explore the implications of these findings by designing potential new home photo technologies, looking at how new designs might support the types of behaviours observed. Through four conceptual designs we examine how photo technology might integrate into the practices and aesthetic of the family home. The concepts led to a set of concluding considerations that need to be taken into account when designing new forms of display technology that are part of a larger domestic photo system

An efficient management system for large digital object collections

Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 87-91)Cultures evolve continuously, and it is therefore vital to track and record these changes, and most importantly of all, manage the resulting huge mass of data such as images, video clips, audio recordings and documents. This thesis examines the design of a Web-based solution, hereafter referred to as the Information Management System (IMS), to handle the efficient, accurate and secure management of a large number of objects

Fotografia como souvenir

A fotografia mostrou ter um papel importante no âmbito do turismo, nomeadamente das viagens dos visitantes, podendo ser guardada como um souvenir e partilhada com outros. O desenvolvimento tecnológico dos equipamentos fotográficos (as câmaras digitais, telemóveis, tablets, entre outros), contribui para se fazer este registo das viagens através da fotografia, assim como para a sua partilha nos media. No entanto, apesar da considerável pesquisa anterior sobre souvenirs, existem poucas pesquisas que investiguem o papel da fotografia como souvenir, as motivações dos visitantes para tirar fotografias ou os elementos de fotografias que são mais fotografados. Além disso, não se conhece nenhuma investigação sobre o impacto da experiência de viagem do visitante nos processos de tirar e partilhar fotografias. A presente investigação pretende suprir as lacunas de investigação anteriormente referidas e identificar o tipo de fotografias que os visitantes mais tiram nas suas viagens turísticas, e se partilham muitas fotografias nas redes sociais. Pretende-se também analisar os fatores que influenciam as fotografias que os visitantes tiram e partilham. Foi utilizada uma metodologia quantitativa, com recolha de dados primários através de um inquérito por questionário, que foi aplicado a residentes em Portugal e na Roménia no sentido de garantir uma diversidade ao nível da amostra global. Depois de caracterizar a amostra através de análises univariadas, foram feitas várias analises fatoriais de carater exploratório para reduzir as variáveis a fatores representativos. Por fim, foram realizadas análises de regressão multivariada para analisar a influência de vários fatores no comportamento dos visitantes de tirar e partilhar fotografias. Os resultados sugerem que os visitantes tendem mais a tirar fotografias de atrações, sejam estas elementos de património cultural, de natureza ou equipamentos de apoio ao turismo, do que a pessoas. Quanto às pessoas é preferido fotografar o grupo de amigos/pessoas com qual o inquirido viaja. Os resultados mostram ainda, entre outros aspetos, que as pessoas com uma experiência de viagem cultural tiram e partilham mais fotografias nas redes sociais. A motivação de partilha nas redes sociais para visibilidade foi a variável que mais se destacou como influenciadora na partilha de fotografias. A informação relativa às fotografias que os visitantes tiram e partilham, assim como aos fatores que influenciam os visitantes no processo de tirar e partilhar fotografias, pode ajudar numa melhor gestão e marketing dos destinos, possibilitando analisar os locais visitados e a experiência dos visitantes através dos seus próprios “olhos”, uma vez que são eles que escolhem o que querem fotografar e depois partilhar. Importa saber se a imagem do destino promovida pelas entidades de turismo é a mesma que está a ser percebida, vivida e partilhada pelos próprios visitantes.Photography has shown to have an important role in tourism, namely in visitors'trips, being able to be kept as a souvenir and shared with others. The technological development of photographic equipment (the digital cameras, mobile phones, tablets, among others), contributes to making this record of travel through photography, as well as to its sharing in the media. However, despite considerable previous research on souvenirs, there is little research that investigates the role of photography as a souvenir, visitors' motivations for taking photographs or the elements of photographs that are most commonly photographed. Furthermore, there is no known research on the impact of the visitor's travel experience on the processes of taking and sharing photographs. The present research aims to fill the previously mentioned research gaps and to identify the type of photographs that visitors take most during their tourist trips, and whether they share many photographs on social networks. It is also intended to analyze the factors that influence the photographs that visitors take and share. A quantitative methodology was used, with primary data collection through a questionnaire survey, which was applied to residents in Portugal and Romania in order to ensure a diversity at the global sample level. After characterizing the sample through univariate analyses, several exploratory factor analyses were performed to reduce the variables to representative factors. Finally, multivariate regression analyses were conducted to analyze the influence of several factors on visitors' photo-taking and sharing behaviour. The results also suggest that visitors are more likely to take pictures of the attractions (cultural heritage, nature or tourism support facilities) than of people. Regarding the photographs of people are showing more the group of people that travels with the visitor. As for people, it is preferred to photograph the group of friends/people with whom the respondent travels. The results further show, among other features, that people with a cultural travel experience take and share more photographs of attractions. The motivation for sharing photographs on social media for visibility, was the variable that most stood out, as influencing the sharing of photographs. The information about the photographs that visitors take and share, as well as about the factors that influence visitors in the process of taking and sharing photographs, can help in a better management and marketing of the destinations, making possible to analyse the visited places and the visitors' experience through their own "eyes", since they are the ones who choose what they want to photograph and then share. It is important to know if the image of the destination promoted by the tourism entities is the same that is being perceived, experienced and shared by the visitors themselves.Mestrado em Gestão e Planeamento em Turism