Curation-in-Action : design for photo curation to support shared remembering

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.Nowadays people deal with unprecedented quantities of personal digital media. This thesis focuses on digital photos, one of the most prevalent digital records people keep. The photos that people capture or collect for their personal collections often acquire personal value as external representations of experiences that can cue autobiographical remembering. The autobiographical value of photos can support remote and especially collocated interactions with others. As a result of technological developments in capturing moments and experiences, people have too many photos to manage, and they lack the time, tools and motivation to curate them effectively which hinders them from using their photos. This thesis aims to inform the design of photo curation tools to support the use of photos, specifically for collocated shared remembering practices. Through three qualitative user studies with a focus on design, we have explored several aspects of the curation challenge. We gained insights into current photo practices, social sharing practices, multi-user interaction, shared remembering, and requirements for curation. Based on these insights this thesis contributes a different perspective on design for curation that specifically focuses on collocated social practices: we introduce our approach to photo curation that we call Curation-in-Action, which by definition integrates curation tasks into the social practices that motivate them