Reminiscence is a valuable human activity; this one-day workshop explores how HCI practice and research can understand and support people in their reminiscing. The workshop has two main goals. First, it hopes to bring together academics and practitioners from both social and technical perspectives who are interested in studying and supporting reminiscence. Second, it hopes to explore key issues around current and potential uses of technology to support reminiscence, including 1) understanding people's current practices around reminiscing, 2) using empirical studies and theories of memory to inform technology designs, 3) evaluating existing technologies for reminiscence, 4) exploring ways that technology might support new reminiscing practices, and 5) supporting social aspects of reminiscence. We are particularly interested in bringing people from outside the CHI community into the workshop to add new perspectives and foster new collaborations around the work. A series of discussionfocused panels organized around the key topics identified by participants will lead to thoughtful examinations of these topics informed by multiple viewpoints. Our tangible planned outputs will be a set of recommendations for further research in this area and an outline plan for grant and book proposals at the intersection of reminiscing and technology.
Reminiscing is a valuable activity that people of all ages spontaneously and informally partake in as part of their everyday lives. This paper discusses the design and use of Pensieve, a system that supports everyday reminiscence by emailing memory triggers to people that contain either social media content they previously created on third-party websites or text prompts about common life experiences. We discuss how the literature on reminiscence informed Pensieve's design, then analyze data from 91 users over five months. We find that people value spontaneous reminders to reminisce as well as the ability to write about their reminiscing. Shorter, more general triggers draw more responses, as do triggers containing people's own photosalthough responses to photos tended to contain more metadata elements than storytelling elements. We compare these results to data from a second, Pensieve-like system developed for Facebook, and suggest a number of important aspects to consider for both designers and researchers around technology and reminiscence.
The increasing popularity of applications that share location information over the internet enables the mapping of people's pictures and activities. Such applications often focus on the now, ignoring the importance of places and stories from the past. Inspired by recent work in HCI around reminiscing, in this paper we present a study in which 16 people used Google My Maps to write about their past, using place as a trigger for memories. People had a wide variety of strategies for choosing which places they remembered and the stories they told about those places; on balance they liked the idea of using maps as a tool for reminiscing, suggesting that this is a promising line of inquiry for further work.
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