Interactive devices can support personal remembering to benefit well-being. These designs require insight into what brings the past to mind, and how people relate to such cues. Prior work focused on mementos in the home; instead, this paper presents a diary and interview study of involuntary memory cueing in everyday life. Data was collected from fifteen adult individuals, using sentence completion diaries, combined with debriefing interviews. Qualitative analysis of the data showed that these participants were relying on everyday physical objects like food items for cueing memories during everyday life, locations and (repeated) activities, while digital items and photos were shown to be less frequent stimulants. Meaningful relations to memory cues can be partially explained from a memory cueing perspective. We discuss how design for remembering can benefit from our insights, through careful trade-offs in timing, exposure to cues, and supporting a process of personal attachment with items invoking memories.

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There is a growing interest in interactive technologies that support remembering by considering functional, experiential, and emotional support to their users. Design driven research benefits from an understanding of how people experience autobiographical remembering. We present a phenomenological study in which twenty-two adults were interviewed using the repertory grid technique; we aimed at soliciting personal constructs that characterize people's remembered experiences. Inductive coding revealed that 77,8% of identified constructs could be reliably coded in five categories referring to contentment, confidence/unease, social interactions, reflection, and intensity. These results align with earlier classifications of personal constructs and models of human emotion. The categorization derived from this study provides an empirically founded characterization of the design space of technologies for supporting remembering. We discuss its potential value as a tool for evaluating interactive systems in relation to personal and social memory talk, and outline future improvements.

Personal photo collections have grown due to digital photography and the introduction of smartphones, and photo collections have become harder to manage. Deleting photos appears to be difficult and the task of curation is often perceived as not enjoyable. The lack of curation can make it harder to retrieve photos when people need them for various reasons, such as individual reminiscing, shared remembering or self-presentation. In this study we investigate how we can stimulate people to organise their photo collections on their smartphones. Ten participants evaluated and qualitatively compared four applications with different characteristics regarding voting on and deleting photos. We found that voting on photos is easier and more enjoyable in comparison to deleting photos, that participants showed reminiscence while organising, that deleting can be frustrating, that participants have different preferences for sorting and viewing photos and that voting could make deleting and retrieving easier. CCS CONCEPTS• Information systems~Users and interactive retrieval • Humancentered computing~Interaction design • Human-centered computing~Smartphones