Things That Make Us Reminisce

Abstract

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.

Supporting Real‐Time Contextual Inquiry through Sensor Data

“…A challenge for both methods is that their self-reported nature may compromise the accuracy and detail of the data. In diary studies, participants often self-report when it is convenient for them, and this retrospective recall may lead to reflections going unreported (Gennip, Hoven and Markopoulos 2015). Data capture may help with this, for example Gouveia and Karapanos (2013) explored lifelogging as an alternative to self-reported entries, where the participants were asked to review daily collections of media.…”

“…Where past research has identified that experience sampling, and diary studies can miss details of the contexts that are being explored (Csikszentmihalyi, Rathunde and Whalen 1993;Gennip, Hoven and Markopoulos 2015;, this method facilitates communication close to the time when the activity is occurring. We are interrupting people's activities and prompting reflection in the moment, trading off between participants' ability to recall and the intrusiveness of being asked about what you are doing.…”

“…Contemporary design ethnography practices, such as thing ethnography, ethno-mining, and Ethnobot, offer promising new directions for remote ethnographic research, with potential to be scaled up. Meanwhile HCI research methods such as experience sampling and diary studies, can be implemented at scale, but often rely on recall and self-reporting (Brown, Sellen and O'Hara 2000;Csikszentmihalyi, Rathunde and Whalen 1993;Gennip, Hoven and Markopoulos 2015).…”

School's Back

“…Prior work in HCI has studied how digital technology can play a role in mediating reminiscence. Research on solitary reminiscence has explored how technology can be designed to support the categorisation of personal artefacts [17,54] or personal reflection over meaningful events [41,42,56]. In comparison, research on social reminiscence has explored how technologies such as multi-touch tabletops and photo viewers can provide families, young people and older adults with opportunities to interact around personal artefacts [1,24,43,55].…”

Possessions and memories

“…The qualities of possessions as external things that surround us throughout our day-to-day lives offer unique opportunities to exercise a level of control over our memories. Archiving, displaying or using possessions within the home that cue memories allows us to connect with the past, bringing it closer to the present or to store it away, giving us permission to forget [32,33]. As physical possessions age, they form patinas (a film, gloss or sheen) and traces of use that reinforce their shared history with the owner [28**,34].…”