Capture & Curating Digital Mementos
Published:
How can we help parent’s capture memories of their young children? What do they want to capture, and how do they know if what they’ve recorded is meaningful to them?
KidKeeper is a collaborative project with two goals:
- exploring the potential of interactive physical artifacts to enable the creation of family mementos that are difficult to capture and preserve by other means (in this case, candid voice recordings of young children)
- creating a probe to proactively generate “digital overload” in order to further our understanding of how much of a good thing is too much
For the first goal, we created a plush toy with affordances for young children to record their own voices while they were playing. The children in the study created hundreds of recordings over a 1 week deployment period (in their own homes), and we learned some interested nuances about how parents judge mementos they want to keep versus ones that can be discarded.
Learn more about the KidKeeper design and deployment study »
and click on image below for demo video:
We followed up the KidKeeper deployment with the development of Kurator, an semi-automated curation platform to assist parents in combing through an overwhelming amount of potential mementos to find the gems. Kurator was initialized with some best-practice and common sense rules based on our observations during the study and David’s own experience living with toddlers who have access to microphones (e.g. delete empty recording, detect and delete screaming). After initialization, Kurator learned each parents’ preferences for childhood mementos through a combination of parent feedback on Kurator’s selections from their own archive, and suggestions from expert crowds (i.e. other parents). This tiered approach could be useful in reducing the burden of digital overload while enabling subjective preferences in curating large collections of digital mementos.