TY - JOUR T1 - House Memory: On Activity Traces As a Form of Cultural Heritage JF - ACM interactions Y1 - 2014 A1 - Dong, Tao A1 - Newman, Mark W. A1 - Ackerman, Mark S. KW - activity traces KW - cultural heritage KW - houses KW - memory KW - memory applications KW - memory traces KW - pervasive environments KW - ubicomp environments AB -

In the past few years, we have seen a wave of new "smart" consumer products that make everyday places aware of our activities. There are thermostats that adjust temperatures based on occupancy [1], doors that alert us when we forget to close them, and "beacons" that track our indoor locations [2]. With recent advances in sensor technologies and the Internet of Things, every corner of our world is slated to gain some capability of capturing our activity traces.

As everyday places become more aware of what we do, an enormous volume of activity traces can be captured and potentially amassed over the long run. Yet the narratives surrounding those technologies mostly focus on short-term gains in efficiency and comfort; few have considered the long-term value of those captured traces. We are concerned that traces will be discarded prematurely, since the perceived risk to privacy easily outweighs the as yet unclear benefits. Thus, it is important to ask: How might we, or rather our future generations, find digital footprints left in a place useful in the long term?

VL - 21 UR - Complete-OnlyDOI ER - TY - CONF T1 - "If These Walls Could Talk": Designing with Memories of Places T2 - Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems Y1 - 2014 A1 - Tao Dong A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - Mark W. Newman KW - activity traces KW - family memory KW - memory KW - memory artifacts KW - pervasive environments KW - ubicomp environments AB -

This work explores the potential value of using the enormous amount of activity traces latest ubicomp environments have started to capture. We sought to understand potential practices of using these traces in the long term through a field-based study in the USA that examines how today's people use traces left by their predecessors in the houses where they live.

We found that our participants received, discovered, and made use of many small traces held by artifacts, people, and building materials. Those traces were used to provide practical assistance to participants' appropriation of their houses as well as to connect participants with the past in an evocative manner. Our analysis highlights the roles played by the social context and the mutability of the house in the experience of remembering the house as well as in shaping participants' attitudes of passing on traces of prior appropriation of the place. To illustrate the design implications of those findings, we offer three design concepts to characterize potential ways of using traces captured by ubicomp environments in the long term.

JF - Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems PB - ACM CY - New York, NY, USA SN - 978-1-4503-2902-6 UR - Complete-NoFile ER - TY - Generic T1 - Family Memory in a Taiwanese Context T2 - CHI’12 Workshop on "Heritage Matters: Designing for Current and Future Values Through Digital and Social Technologies" Y1 - 2012 A1 - Ying-yu Chen A1 - Mark S. Ackerman KW - memory KW - memory artifacts AB -

In this paper, we explore how Taiwanese practices of family memory and memory artifacts show significant differences from those in the US, suggesting important memory practices are cultural and collective. For example, Taiwanese do not keep pictures of deceased ancestors in the same way as Americans might, they do not have family heirlooms, nor do they keep extensive childhood memorabilia. We studied this through 20 interviews and household inventories conducted in Taiwan.

JF - CHI’12 Workshop on "Heritage Matters: Designing for Current and Future Values Through Digital and Social Technologies" UR - Complete ER -