This project is all about thinking about technology in the long term. While we tend to think of most digital things as only having a shelf life of a few years, the reality is that we're now taking digital photos, and keeping digital items, for long enough that we have to start thinking about the consequences of using them for reminiscing in the future, and even passing them on to our offspring. What does it mean to inherit someone's PC or to use digital technology to reflect on someone's life?
A couple of good starting points for understanding this project are this blog post titled An Introduction to Technology Heirlooms, and this video presentation by Richard Banks from the Interaction10 conference entitled The 40 Year Old Tweet.
This project has resulted in the development of 3 artifacts, Timecard, Backup Box and the Digital Slide Viewer. Descriptions of these are available in a blog post entitled Some Technology Heirlooms. Videos of Backup Box and the Digital Slide Viewer have also been posted here.
Timecard
Backup Box
Backup Box User Interface
Digital Slide Viewer
Viewing a Digital Slide
- Richard Banks, The future of looking back, Microsoft, September 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
- 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
- William Odom, Richard Banks, and David Kirk, Reciprocity, Deep Storage and Letting go: opportunities for designing interactions with inherited digital materials, in Interactions Volume 17, Issue 5, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., September 2010
- David S. Kirk and Abigail Sellen, On human remains: Value and practice in the home archiving of cherished objects. , in ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., July 2010
- Abigail Sellen and Steve Whittaker, Beyond total capture: A constructive critique of lifelogging., in Communications of the ACM, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., May 2010
- Will Odom, Richard Harper, Abigail Sellen, Dave Kirk, and Richard Banks, Passing on and putting to rest: Understanding bereavement in the context of interactive technologies, in Proceedings of CHI 2010, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., April 2010
- Abigail Durrant, Alex S. Taylor, David Frohlich, Abigail Sellen, and David Uzzell, Photo displays and intergenerational relationships in the family home, in People and Computers XXIII, Celebrating People and Technology, Proceedings of HCI 2009, Churchill College Cambridge, UK, 1 September 2009
- Abigail Sellen, Yvonne Rogers, Richard Harper, and Tom Rodden, Reflecting human values in the digital age, in Communications of the ACM, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 2009
- David Kirk and Richard Banks, On the Design of Technology Heirlooms, in International Workshop on Social Interaction and Mundane Technologies (SIMTech ’08), November 2008