Making Public Media Personal: Nostalgia and Reminiscence in the Office

In this paper we explore the notion of creating personally evocative collections of content from publicly available material. Compared to the personal media that we look at, reminisce over, or personalise our offices with, public media offers the potential for a different type of nostalgia, signifiers of an era such as entertainment, products, or fashions. We focus on an office environment, where the use of filtered public media may mitigate concerns over protecting privacy and disclosing too much of one's identity, while keeping the existing benefits of office personalisation in terms of reminiscence, improving mood, and developing identity. After preliminary explorations of content and form, we developed a two-screen ambient display that cycled through 500 images automatically retrieved based on four simple user questions. We ran a two-week trial of the display with six users. We present qualitative results of the trial from which we see that it is possible to bring the delight associated with personal content into the workplace, while being mindful of issues of appropriateness and privacy. Images of locations from childhood were particularly evocative for all participants, while simple objects such as stickers, music, or boardgames were more varied across participants. We discuss a number of avenues for future work in the workplace and beyond: improving the chance of an evocative moment, capturing the mundane, and the crowdsourcing of nostalgia

Internal Accession Date Only Approved for External Publication 1 People and Computers XVII

peer-to-peer, knowledge workers, information lifecycle, information sharing, web use, information gathering The success of peer-to-peer (p2p) music-sharing has no doubt contributed to assumptions that individuals' PCs are a vast untapped resource of assets just waiting to be unlocked. This includes the push for opening up our file spaces at work to allow peers access to previously inaccessible information. We explore the potential of these ideas and test some of the assumptions underlying them by looking at 16 knowledge workers' file spaces in the context of Web information-gathering tasks. Knowledge workers' file spaces are more like "workbenches" than "archives" and the information held within them is fundamentally different to that which is placed in shared information spaces. Work is carried out on information to make it shareable, yet this information is found side-by-side on the "workbench" with unshareable information. This leads us to question the potential value of enabling people to open up their file spaces without considering the reusability of this information for others. The success of peer-to-peer (p2p) music sharing has no doubt contributed to assumptions that individuals' PCs are a vast untapped resource of assets just waiting to be unlocked by such systems. This includes the push for opening up our file spaces at work to allow peers access to previously inaccessible information with minimum effort. We wished to explore the potential value of these ideas and to test some of the assumptions underlying them, the motivation being that we believed the issues raised by this investigation would be important to those developing p2p information sharing tools. We do this by looking at the flow of information in and out of 16 knowledge workers' file spaces in the context of carrying out Web information gathering tasks at work. In doing this we find that the file spaces used for knowledge work are more like "workbenches" than "archives" and that the information held within them is fundamentally different in content and organisation to that which knowledge workers place in shared information spaces such as the Web. Knowledge workers work on their information to make it shareable to specific audiences yet this information is found side by side on the "workbench" with unshareable information. This leads us to question the potential value of enabling people to open up their file spaces without having regard to the reusability of this information for others

Digital collections and digital collection practices

Reference is increasingly made to ‘digital collections’, yet this term encompasses accumulated digital objects of varying form, purpose and value. We review social science literature on mate-rial collections and draw from in-depth interviews with 20 peo-ple in the UK in order to offer a clearer understanding of what constitutes a digital collection and what does not. We develop a taxonomy that presents three distinct types of digital collection and demonstrate ways in which the affordances of digital envi-ronments may facilitate or impede meaningful practices of ac-quisition, curation and exhibition in each case. Through doing so, we present a framework for design in support of collecting prac-tices and the development of more meaningful and valued digital collections

Pick Up and Play: Understanding Tangibility for Cloud Media

ABSTRACT The transition from local and personally owned file-based media management to cloud-based streaming services such as Spotify and Netflix brings new opportunities for users, but also leaves gaps in their understanding and practice. In this paper we present findings from an interview study that explored early adopters' complex relationships with their collections which spanned physical, digital and cloud media. From this we entered a design process focussing on new material forms for cloud based media. Based on this we discuss our design and point to areas where, tangible or not, affordances from physical and digital media are available to be explored in the cloud. Looking in particular at the concepts of scarcity, gifting, and identity we outline possible reasons why, and why not, they could be incorporated into cloud media services

Flexible and Mindful Self-Tracking: Design Implications from Paper Bullet Journals

Digital self-tracking technologies offer many potential benefits over self-tracking with paper notebooks. However, they are often too rigid to support people’s practical and emotional needs in everyday settings. To inform the design of more flexible self-tracking tools, we examine bullet journaling: an analogue and customisable approach for logging and reflecting on everyday life. Analysing a corpus of paper bullet journal photos and related conversations on Instagram, we found that individuals extended and adapted bullet journaling systems to their changing practical and emotional needs through: (1) creating and combining personally meaningful visualisations of different types of trackers, such as habit, mood, and symptom trackers; (2) engaging in mindful reflective thinking through design practices and self-reflective strategies; and (3) posting photos of paper journals online to become part of a selftracking culture of sharing and learning. We outline two interrelated design directions for flexible and mindful selftracking: digitally extending analogue self-tracking and supporting digital self-tracking as a mindful design practice

Socio-technical lifelogging: deriving design principles for a future proof digital past

Lifelogging is a technically inspired approach that attempts to address the problem of human forgetting by developing systems that ‘record everything’. Uptake of lifelogging systems has generally been disappointing, however. One reason for this lack of uptake is the absence of design principles for developing digital systems to support memory. Synthesising multiple studies, we identify and evaluate 4 new empirically motivated design principles for lifelogging: Selectivity, Embodiment, Synergy and Reminiscence. We first summarise 4 empirical studies that motivate the principles, then describe the evaluation of 4 novel systems built to embody these principles. The design principles were generative, leading to the development of new classes of lifelogging system, as well as providing strategic guidance about how those systems should be built. Evaluations suggest support for Selection and Embodiment principles, but more conceptual and technical work is needed to refine the Synergy and Reminiscence principles

Smooth-i:smart re-calibration using smooth pursuit eye movements

Eye gaze for interaction is dependent on calibration. However, gaze calibration can deteriorate over time affecting the usability of the system. We propose to use motion matching of smooth pursuit eye movements and known motion on the display to determine when there is a drift in accuracy and use it as input for re-calibration. To explore this idea we developed Smooth-i, an algorithm that stores calibration points and updates them incrementally when inaccuracies are identified. To validate the accuracy of Smooth-i, we conducted a study with five participants and a remote eye tracker. A baseline calibration profile was used by all participants to test the accuracy of the Smooth-i re-calibration following interaction with moving targets. Results show that Smooth-i is able to manage re-calibration efficiently, updating the calibration profile only when inaccurate data samples are detected

Exploring New Metaphors for a Networked World through the File Biography

We present a body of work undertaken in response to the challenge outlined by Harper et al. in their paper, ‘What is a File?’ [9]. As a reimagining of the file metaphor, we intro-duce the file biography, a digital entity that encompasses the provenance of a file and allows the user to keep track of how it propagates. First, we describe the design and con-ceptual work that grounded the file biography. We then report findings from two studies in which we (i) asked users to sketch out file biographies for their own content, and (ii) deployed a tool called Milestoner, which enables users to build their own file biographies across multiple versions of files. We conclude by drawing implications for new file metaphors and the actions they enable

Dealing with mobility: Understanding access anytime, anywhere

The rapid and accelerating move towards the adoption and use of mobile technologies has increasingly provided people and organisations with the ability to work away from the office and on the move. The new ways of working afforded by these technologies are often characterised in terms of access to information and people ‘anytime, anywhere’. This paper presents a study of mobile workers that highlights different facets of access to remote people and information, and different facets of anytime, anywhere. Four key factors in mobile work are identified from the study: the role of planning, working in ‘dead time’, accessing remote technological and informational resources, and monitoring the activities of remote colleagues. By reflecting on these issues, we can better understand the role of technology and artefact use in mobile work and identify the opportunities for the development of appropriate technological solutions to support mobile workers