STUDYING THE FUNCTIONS OF SHARABLE DIGITAL MEMORIES
Author(s):
Catalin Barbu,
Alexander Kröner,
Michael Schneider,
Oliver Jacobs
Paper abstract: The ongoing augmentation of our everyday environment with digital artifacts and electronic sensors
enables machines to observe with increasing precision a user’s interaction with the environment and
contained applications. If these observations are recorded over time, then the resulting collection can
become a user’s personal “digital memory”. Like a blog, such a semi-automatically built resource can be
of interest for sharing information between users. With this article, we want to provide some answers to
the question of how people exploit other persons’ digital memories, and how the resulting sharing
behavior can be evaluated. We report about two small-scale user studies, which emphasized different
aspects of the exploitation of shared personal memories in the everyday. Our report comprises a short
description of a platform for collecting and sharing digital memories used in both scenarios, the study
methods, and a discussion of the results. These confirm the utility of the respective sharing approaches
and provide an insight to people’s expectations concerning the interaction with such a resource.
Keywords:
Digital Memory, Instrumented Environments, Content Sharing, User Study
