The Future of Looking Back
Creating new value from reflecting on the past
This theme examines the possibilities for amassing and interacting with diverse collections of data and media related to personal experience, and asks what will become of this all in the future. Rather than to assume that such collections will provide us all with a prosthetic memory, we wish to explore a much larger and richer set of human values that such personal archives might highlight. This includes the way people construct a new sense of the past, how we can use such materials to honour and commemorate others, how we might use these materials to reminisce, and even the consideration of the importance of forgetting. In so doing, this theme is not just about memory, but is also about notions of identity, expression, narrative, and reflection. We examine these topics not just from the point of view of technology, or indeed psychology. Here we take a more multidisciplinary approach incorporating design, sociology, and anthropology too. The ambition in this work is not just to more deeply understand what value people derive from looking back, but also to open up the design space to new kinds of technological possibilities.
Key research questions include:
- What kinds of value do people place on different kinds of personal data and why?
- Do these materials help us recollect the past, or do they help us reconstruct it or reflect on it in new ways?
- How can personal archives be designed to both augment and enrich our interaction with the past?
- How can archives be designed to allow us to orient ourselves toward the future?
- What kinds of tools will help people to more creatively engage with materials from their past?
- How can families or other social groups use these materials to construct new kinds of content?
- Can we create new technologies to alleviate some of the guilt families feel about not dealing with and managing growing collections of photos, videos and other family media?
- What is the importance of being able to forget some of our past, and how can technology support it?
- What should happen with people’s personal digital content when people die, and how can we create technologies that can be passed on, perhaps ultimately becoming heirlooms in the process?
Example Projects:
- Family Archive
- Human Memory in the Digital Age (book)
- Technology Heirlooms
- Narratives and reminiscing
- TimeCard
- Photoboxes
- Day of the Dead
Publications
- William Odom, Abigail Sellen, Richard Harper, and Eno Thereska, Lost in Translation: Understanding the Possession of Digital Things in the Cloud, in ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems , ACM, 5 May 2012
- Michelle L. Mazurek, Eno Thereska, Dinan Gunawardena, R.Harper, and James Scott, ZZFS: A hybrid device and cloud file system for spontaneous users, in Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST'12), USENIX, February 2012
- David Coyle, Conor Linehan, Karen Tang, and Siân Lindley, Interaction design and emotional wellbeing, in CHI 2012 Extended Abstracts, ACM, 2012
- Helena M. Mentis, Kenton O'Hara, Abigail Sellen, and Rikin Trivedi, Interaction Proxemics and Image Use in Neurosurgery, ACM Conference on Computer-Human Interaction, 2012
- Helena M. Mentis, Siân E. Lindley, Stuart Taylor, Paul Dunphy, Tim Regan, and Richard Harper, Taking as an Act of Sharing, in Proceedings of Computer Support Cooperative Work, ACM, 2012
- William Odom, Richard Banks, Richard Harper, David Kirk, Siân Lindley, and Abigail Sellen, Technology heirlooms? Considerations for passing down and inheriting digital materials, in Proceedings of the 2012 SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems (CHI 2012), ACM, 2012
- Simon Fothergill, Helena M. Mentis, Sebastian Nowozin, and Pushmeet Kohli, Instructing People for Training Gestural Interactive Systems, ACM Conference on Computer-Human Interaction, 2012
- R.Harper and Editor, The Connected Home: the future of domestic life , Springer, December 2011
- Richard Harper, Eno Thereska, Sian Lindley, Richard Banks, Phil Gosset, William Odom, Gavin Smyth, and Eryn Whitworth, What is a File?, no. MSR-TR-2011-109, 1 October 2011
- Professor Anthony Dunne, Onkar Kular, Richard Banks, Alex Taylor, Tim Regan, David Benqué, Dash Macdonald, Demitrios Kargotis, Kobe Barhad, Nicolas Myers, Sascha Pohflepp, Chris Woebken, and Kellenberger–White, The Future of Writing, October 2011
- Richard Banks, The future of looking back, Microsoft, September 2011
- Daniela K. Rosner and Alex S. Taylor, Antiquarian answers: book restoration as a resource for design, in Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems, CHI '11, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., New York, NY, USA, 11 May 2011
- Petra Sundström, Alex Taylor, Katja Grufberg, Niklas Wirström, Jordi Solsona Belenguer, and Marcus Lundén, Inspirational bits: towards a shared understanding of the digital material, in Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems, CHI '11, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., New York, NY, USA, 10 May 2011
- Jonathan Hook, David Green, John McCarthy, Stuart Taylor, Peter Wright, and Patrick Olivier, A VJ Centered Exploration of Expressive Interaction, ACM Conference on Computer-Human Interaction, 9 May 2011
- Alex S. Taylor, Out there, in Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems, CHI '11, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., New York, NY, USA, 9 May 2011
- Siân E. Lindley, Passing on memories in later life, in CHI 2011 workshop on Bridging Practices, Theories, and Technologies to Support Reminiscence, 8 May 2011
- Siân E. Lindley, Maxine Glancy, Richard Harper, Dave Randall, and Nicola Smyth, “Oh and how things just don’t change, the more things stay the same”: Reflections on SenseCam images 18 months after capture, in International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, vol. 69, no. 5, pp. 311-323, Elsevier, May 2011
- Graham Pullin, Jon Rogers, Richard Banks, Tim Regan, Ali Napier, and Polly Duplock, Social Digital Objects for Grandparents , in Proceedings of Include 2011 conference on inclusive and people-centred design., Royal College of Art, London, 18 April 2011
- Marshini Chetty, Richard Banks, AJ Brush, Jonathan Donner, and Rebecca E. Grinter, While the Meter is Running: Computing in a Capped World, in Interactions Volume 18, Issue 2, vol. 18, ACM, 1 March 2011
- Tamara Alsheikh, Jennifer A. Rode, and Siân E. Lindley, (Whose) value-sensitive design: A study of long-distance relationships in an Arabic cultural context, in Proceedings of the 2011 ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2011), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., March 2011
- John Helmes, Alexander Taylor, alex taylor, Kristina Höök, Peter Schmitt, Nicolas Villar, and Xiang Cao, Rudiments 1, 2 & 3: Design Speculations on Autonomy, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., January 2011
- Yan Xu, Xian Cao, Abigail Sellen, Ralf Herbrich, and Thore Graepel, Sociable killers: understanding social relationships in an online first-person shooter game, in CSCW '11 Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer supported cooperative work , ACM, 2011
- Siân E. Lindley, Shades of lightweight: Supporting cross-generational communication through home messaging, in Universal Access in the Information Society., 2011
- Michael Massimi, William Odom, Richard Banks, and David Kirk, Matters of life and death: locating the end of life in lifespan-oriented hci research, in Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI 2011), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 2011
- John Helmes, Alex S. Taylor, Xiang Cao, Kristina Höök, Peter Schmitt, and Nicolas Villar, Rudiments 1, 2 & 3: design speculations on autonomy, in Proceedings of the fifth international conference on Tangible, embedded, and embodied interaction, TEI '11, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., New York, NY, USA, January 2011
