CAREER: Towards Keepsake Technologies to Support Intergenerational Family Memory Practices

This project will contribute conceptual, technical, and empirical insights to the social study of ubiquitous computing technology related to family memory. A popular application of digital media technologies is for reminiscing and sharing memories with others, especially in families trying to pass memories down across generations. An emerging class of systems, "keepsake technologies," integrate interactivity with digital mementos into physical objects to blend seamlessly into family life. Devices range from interactive souvenir boxes to augmented memorial photo altars for deceased family members. Such technologies can provide accessible and engaging ways for generations in a family to tell stories about the family, preserving important history and heritage even across distance and time. Understanding how technologies shape memory practices is especially critical to supporting families that could use these systems to preserve important cultural heritage, such as the cultural minorities in the Appalachian region, where this research takes place. Teams of undergraduate researchers from Appalachia will be deeply involved in this research, learning and practicing culturally situated design methods. The research starts with a literature review of the field, identifying keepsake technologies and characterizing their design. Next, it will develop keepsake technology exemplars inspired by speculative design concepts in the human-centered computing, design, and ubiquitous computing literatures. These exemplars will be used in field studies to explore how keepsake technologies mediate family social interactions around stories about the past, as well as the content of the story itself. To address gaps in the literature, participatory speculative design workshops with community members will generate ideas for technologies for currently unsupported family storytelling practices. The outcomes of this work will be (1) a theoretical framework characterizing design approaches of keepsake technologies, (2) design exemplars of keepsake technologies that support family storytelling with digital mementos, and (3) design implications for culturally sensitive design of ubiquitous computing technologies for family social interactions. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.