Preserving the Past, Enjoying the Present and Facing the Future: Interaction Design and Family Archives

Digital archives of personal memories are becoming increasingly technically feasible, but there remain significant interaction design challenges. These challenges must be addressed before these archives will present interactive experiences that are attractive and emotionally engaging. In this paper, we present a research and design study of the Living Memory Box, a device and service to assist families in preserving memories in a variety of media forms. Through a series of ethnographic interviews and focus groups, we have developed recommendations for the design and development of future personal memory systems. Major improvements, which specifically address our findings, must be considered by future researchers in the coordination of interaction design and technological developments. Keywords domestic technology, ethnographic studies, focus groups, automated capture, multimedia organization, ubiquitous computing, mass media