We present results from a study examining how American Protestant Christians ’ faith affects their domestic life. There are two contributions of this work for the HCI community. First, we provide empirical evidence demonstrating how topics of interest to HCI researchers (e.g., material artifacts, routines, and ICT use) are used for religious purposes. Our findings show how Christians distinguish these aspects of domestic life from their secular counterparts. Second, we use our findings to reflect on current directions of future domestic ICT applications. Specifically, we critically evaluate the “problem solving ” approaches dominating the design of future technologies, and present extraordinary computing or systems that promote and honor the special value accorded to some aspects of domestic life. Author Keywords Religion, domestic technologies

We examine the effects of new technologies for digital photography on people’s longer term storage and access to collections of personal photos. We report an empirical study of parents’ ability to retrieve photos related to salient family events from more than a year ago. Performance was relatively poor with people failing to find almost 40 % of pictures. We analyze participants’ organizational and access strategies to identify reasons for this poor performance. Possible reasons for retrieval failure include: storing too many pictures, rudimentary organization, use of multiple storage systems, failure to maintain collections and participants’ false beliefs about their ability to access photos. We conclude by exploring the technical and theoretical implications of these findings.

This paper is about the evolution of a system prototype called Pensieve whose goal is to support people’s reminiscing practices. A number of technologies exist to manage memory-related content; however, these technologies tend to take a model of memory as information that leads to a focus on capture and access. Pensieve is instead based on reusing memory-laden content people already create in social media services. This idea is supported by theories of autobiographical memory, insights from interviews with eight subjects, and experiences with two prototypes deployed to ten users. These interviews and experiences suggest that people value even simple tools that support reminiscence, as well as providing both design goals and research questions around the design of tools that support people in reminiscing.

Lifelogging technologies can capture both mundane and important experiences in our daily lives, resulting in a rich record of the places we visit and the things we see. This study moves beyond technology demonstrations, in aiming to better understand how and why different types of Lifelogs aid memory. Previous work has demonstrated that Lifelogs can aid recall, but that they do many other things too. They can help us look back at the past in new ways, or to reconstruct what we did in our lives, even if we don’t recall exact details. Here we extend the notion of Lifelogging to include locational information. We augment streams of Lifelog images with geographic data to examine how different types of data (visual or locational) might affect memory. Our results show that visual cues promote detailed memories (akin to recollection). In contrast locational information supports inferential processes – allowing participants to reconstruct habits in their behaviour. Author Keywords Lifelogging, memory, remembering, SenseCam, GPS, geovisual

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The increasing popularity of applications that share location information over the internet enables the mapping of people’s pictures and activities. Such applications often focus on the now, ignoring the importance of places and stories from the past. Inspired by recent work in HCI around reminiscing, in this paper we present a study in which 16 people used Google My Maps to write about their past, using place as a trigger for memories. People had a wide variety of strategies for choosing which places they remembered and the stories they told about those places; on balance they liked the idea of using maps as a tool for reminiscing, suggesting that this is a promising line of inquiry for further work.

In this paper, we describe “The Other Brother”, a semiautonomous device that captures images and video of spontaneous moments in the course of everyday life. It was our goal to design a situated, tangible object for life-time capturing purposes. In addition to describing the object and our deployment findings, this paper also discusses the design process and the goals we were aiming to achieve through the design. This was an iterative process from initial sketches, concepts and physical explorations towards a final design and several prototypes. The final prototype acts as an agent that behaves to some extent autonomously, capturing spontaneous moments that enable people to reexperience these moments in a playful way. Testing The Other Brother in a domestic environment, we describe several findings of the impact of the object in the home, reflect on several design and interaction issues, and discuss future directions for continuation of this research.

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While it can be a delicate and emotionally-laden topic, new technological trends compel us to confront a range of problems and issues about death and bereavement. This area presents complex challenges and the associated literature is extensive. In this paper we offer a way of slicing through several perspectives in the social sciences to see clearly a set of salient issues related to bereavement. Following this, we present a theoretical lens to provide a way of conceptualizing how the HCI community could begin to approach such issues. We then report field evidence from 11 in-depth interviews conducted with bereaved participants and apply the proposed lens to unpack key emergent problems and tensions. We conclude with a discussion on how the HCI design space might be sensitized to better support the social processes that unfold when bereavement occurs. Author Keywords Bereavement, understanding people, digital persistence

Reminiscing is a valuable activity that people of all ages spontaneously and informally partake in as part of their everyday lives. This paper discusses the design and use of Pensieve, a system that supports everyday reminiscence by emailing memory triggers to people that contain either social media content they previously created on third-party websites or text prompts about common life experiences. We discuss how the literature on reminiscence informed Pensieve’s design, then analyze data from 91 users over five months. We find that people value spontaneous reminders to reminisce as well as the ability to write about their reminiscing. Shorter, more general triggers draw more responses, as do triggers containing people’s own photos— although responses to photos tended to contain more metadata elements than storytelling elements. We compare these results to data from a second, Pensieve-like system developed for Facebook, and suggest a number of important aspects to consider for both designers and researchers around technology and reminiscence. Author Keywords Reminiscence, episodic memory, autobiographical memory,