TY - CONF T1 - Curating an Infinite Basement: Understanding How People Manage Collections of Sentimental Artifacts T2 - Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Supporting Group Work Y1 - 2016 A1 - Jones, Jasmine A1 - Ackerman, Mark S. KW - collection management KW - curation KW - digital curation KW - digital memento KW - family memory KW - memorabilia KW - memory artifacts KW - pervasive computing KW - sentimental artifacts KW - ubicomp AB -

Valuable memories are increasingly captured and stored as digital artifacts. However, as people amass these digital mementos, their collections are rarely curated, due to the volume of content, the effort involved, and a general lack of motivation, which can result in important artifacts being obscured and forgotten in an accumulation of content over time. Our study aims to better understand the challenges and goals of people dealing with large collections, and to provide insight into how people select and pay attention to large collections of digital mementos. We conducted an interpretivist analysis of forum data from UnclutterNow.com, where participants discussed issues they face in curating the sentimental artifacts in their homes. We uncovered a number of social, temporal, and spatial affordances and concerns that influence the ways that people curate their memories, and discuss how curation is closely tied to how people use storage and display in their home. In our study, we drew out and unpack "curation regimes" as patterns that people enact to focus the attention they are able to pay to the artifacts in their collections. We close with a discussion of the design opportunities for memory artifacts, which support and facilitate the curatorial processes of users managing digital mementos in everyday life.

JF - Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Supporting Group Work UR - Complete ER - TY - CONF T1 - "If These Walls Could Talk": Designing with Memories of Places T2 - Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems Y1 - 2014 A1 - Tao Dong A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - Mark W. Newman KW - activity traces KW - family memory KW - memory KW - memory artifacts KW - pervasive environments KW - ubicomp environments AB -

This work explores the potential value of using the enormous amount of activity traces latest ubicomp environments have started to capture. We sought to understand potential practices of using these traces in the long term through a field-based study in the USA that examines how today's people use traces left by their predecessors in the houses where they live.

We found that our participants received, discovered, and made use of many small traces held by artifacts, people, and building materials. Those traces were used to provide practical assistance to participants' appropriation of their houses as well as to connect participants with the past in an evocative manner. Our analysis highlights the roles played by the social context and the mutability of the house in the experience of remembering the house as well as in shaping participants' attitudes of passing on traces of prior appropriation of the place. To illustrate the design implications of those findings, we offer three design concepts to characterize potential ways of using traces captured by ubicomp environments in the long term.

JF - Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems PB - ACM CY - New York, NY, USA SN - 978-1-4503-2902-6 UR - Complete-NoFile ER - TY - Generic T1 - Family Memory in a Taiwanese Context T2 - CHI’12 Workshop on "Heritage Matters: Designing for Current and Future Values Through Digital and Social Technologies" Y1 - 2012 A1 - Ying-yu Chen A1 - Mark S. Ackerman KW - memory KW - memory artifacts AB -

In this paper, we explore how Taiwanese practices of family memory and memory artifacts show significant differences from those in the US, suggesting important memory practices are cultural and collective. For example, Taiwanese do not keep pictures of deceased ancestors in the same way as Americans might, they do not have family heirlooms, nor do they keep extensive childhood memorabilia. We studied this through 20 interviews and household inventories conducted in Taiwan.

JF - CHI’12 Workshop on "Heritage Matters: Designing for Current and Future Values Through Digital and Social Technologies" UR - Complete ER -