Hello and thank you for attending this session. My name is Benett Axtell and I'll be presenting
Design is Worth a Thousand Words: The Effect of Digital Interaction Design On Picture-Prompted Reminiscence.
Many of our family and personal social connections
are made around family and personal pictures:
Looking at pictures in a photo album or spread out on a table.
These pictures act as memory prompts to support building family histories, experiences of reminiscence,
and senses of self-narrative. However users find that digital picture settings generally
fall short of physical ones in terms of supporting reminiscence.
Reminiscence generally isn't seen as part of these digital picture tools.
And specific causes of this are not well understood
So we use a controlled setting to explore how the design of picture interactions
might impact reminiscence.
Specifically we want to measure how the type of interaction with digital pictures impacts the prompted memories
both the type of memory and the number.
And we ask is there a better way to design digital picture interactions for reminiscence.
We used a controlled setting to compare three conditions in a counterbalanced within users study.
and we use stock photos of a generally recognizable setting in this case Paris, France
to control for the type of prompts across participants.
Two of these conditions come from common applications: the Gallery and the Slideshow.
The Gallery is similar to a phone's camera roll or a profile page on Instagram.
It shows many pictures together.
The Slideshow shows one picture at a time and is similar to swiping through pictures at full screen
on either a phone or a tablet.
The third condition is a novel condition we designed from previous findings
suggesting that digital interactions lack a visual context between related pictures.
So we draw on the physical metaphor of a tabletop
to present more detail of each picture
but maintain that physical context between them.
36 participants used their own tablets
or touchscreen computers to complete the study
and we intentionally included a broad range of ages
to represent the different generations that engage with reminiscence
From the recorded storytelling sessions, two researchers manually identified and coded memories
as being either person-centred (something that shared a personal experience)
or external (something that shared learned facts).
This is important because those person-centred memories, including episodic memories,
are central to reminiscence more so than external ones.
An example of a person-centred memory could be, "I was in Chicago with the good bikes
the good little bike stalls and rental bikes and go around the city with them.
The hard part was trying to find where to put the bike back afterwards."
And for an example of an external memory, "It's a very nice winter morning.
It's not a lot of snow, but on the outsides you can see people walking."
From our analysis we find that the Gallery prompts significantly fewer
memories overall than either the Slideshow or the Tabletop conditions.
We find that this is caused by that cropped grid of pictures.
Meaning that each picture is too small to be seen on its own
and too many pictures together to find a strong prompt for any of our memories.
The slideshow prompts more external memories overall, but not more person-centred.
That focus on a single picture gives time to notice the little details,
but it lacks that broader context across pictures limiting how that can connect to our experiences.
The Tabletop prompts more memories than the Gallery, just as the Slideshow does,
but not more of one type (either person-centred or external).
This suggests that it is more representative of those social reminiscence settings
like photo albums and tabletops of pictures
With a mix of memories prompted by balancing picture size and picture context.
Overall, the design of digital interactions has a direct impact on how memories are prompted.
In order for digital pictures to prompt reminiscence as easily as physical pictures
designs will need to intentionally support that reminiscence.
The current digital options do have shortcomings.
The Gallery pictures are too small to see what each one shows.
And the Slideshow shows picture detail but removes that from the broader context between related pictures
A better setting for reminiscence comes from considering the balance between
showing the whole detail of the picture
and the context between different pictures in a set.
Considering the impact of digital interactions is key to supporting
the social practices surrounding our personal and family pictures.
Thank you