Bridging practices, theories, and technologies to support reminiscence

Abstract

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.

Member activities and quality of tags in a collection of historical photographs in Flickr

“…The findings also point to the importance of libraries and museums in encouraging and facilitating a larger variety of user activities and experiences around their collections, not merely search and retrieval or browsing. There is promising research on matching member interests to work tasks in Wikipedia (Cosley, Frankowski, Terveen, & Ried, 2007) and triggering reminiscence by using archives of personal documents and impersonal prompts (e.g., Cosley et al, 2009;Gemmell, Bell, & Lueder, 2006). An interesting extension of that research might be studying the usefulness of social reminiscence theories and technologies to facilitate metadata and knowledge creation for collections of historical photographs.…”

Assessing the value of brief automated biographies

“…TMR goes beyond simply using technology to document important life events; it focuses on the ways we may benefit from reflecting on them over time. With the exception of [49] and [50], other systems that utilise online presence in this manner are explained as only reminding users about past events. The Echo application allows curation of activities by the uploading pictures, text descriptions and ratings of emotional states.…”

Scenario-based design of a digital reminiscing system for the elderly

“…HCI research in the area of reminiscing has investigated ways to trigger and elicit memories [4][5][6]. For example, Pensieve is a reminiscing system that prompts users with photos or status that they have previously posted to social networks [7]. Palaver Tree Online [8] was a system through which children and elders collaborated on the creation of oral histories.…”

“…Adtep, Kay and Quigley [9] developed a table top digital photo sharing system. Other systems have been developed to allow individuals to document their entire life [10] as well as being prompted to reminisce based on old posts to social networking sites [7].…”

“…There has recently been interest within the HCI community concerning both current practices and digital tools for reminiscing [11]. The focus of this research can be viewed as responding to this call with two complementary research elements: an interest in the human-computer interaction (HCI) needs and preferences for elderly individuals and a design research interest in digital tools for supporting reminiscing.…”