WORK

Many people have literally tens of thousands of digital photos and then still manage to have old, regular photos in shoeboxes and in albums buried away in their homes. This is a pretty glaring example of how we haven’t necessarily come to grips with how technology has taken over our lives and still keep on wanting to keep inferior technologies (paper for instance) around because they still mean a lot to us.

The research and work at Microsoft Research (Cambridge, UK) on family archives was part of the Social Digital Systems group and centred around ideas of the family and how they act and interact in the home. The output of this research was intended to be thinking and design based on the idea of a family of discreet objects that were networked and worked together as well as independently.

The digital photo album is meant as a display for a single person with each ‘page’ as a container for each event or period of their lives. This way one can quickly take the album off of the shelf and see content for just that person and be able to simply navigate through each page by sliding their finger along the spine and tapping to select. It is a digital album that typically the head of the household would curate, or otherwise put together It is something that can be put on a shelf to be proud of, to quickly show someone who might have just dropped by.

Related Papers and Publications

Opening Up the Family Archive (KIRK, IZADI, SELLEN, TAYLOR, BANKS, HILLEGES 2010)

Proceedings of ACM Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW 2010)

Twitter It! Tags:design, interaction, research, user experience