Making Public Media Personal: Nostalgia and Reminiscence in the Office

Abstract

In this paper we explore the notion of creating personally evocative collections of content from publicly available material. Compared to the personal media that we look at, reminisce over, or personalise our offices with, public media offers the potential for a different type of nostalgia, signifiers of an era such as entertainment, products, or fashions. Reminiscence from public media may be particularly valuable in the workplace, where existing practices of office personalisation bring benefits, but also concerns in terms of privacy and disclosing too much of one’s identity. The use of filtered public media may mitigate concerns over privacy, while providing similar benefits in terms of reminiscence, improving mood, and developing identity. After preliminary explorations of content and form, we developed a two-screen ambient display that cycled through 500 images automatically retrieved based on four simple user questions. We ran a two-week trial of the display with six users. We present qualitative results of the trial from which we see that it is possible to bring the delight associated with personal content into the workplace, while being mindful of issues of appropriateness and privacy. Images of locations from childhood were particularly evocative for all participants, while simple objects such as stickers, music, or boardgames were more varied across participants. We discuss a number of avenues for future work in the workplace and beyond: improving the chance of an evocative moment, capturing the mundane, and the crowdsourcing of nostalgia.

Contributors

Paul André

Abigail Sellen

m.c. schraefel

Ken Wood

Conference

Publication date: July 2011

Publication date (Print): July 2011

Pages: 351-360

Affiliations

[1 ]Electronics and Computer Science

University of Southampton, UK

[2 ]Microsoft Research

Cambridge, UK

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/HCI2011.65

Copyright statement: © Paul André et al. Published by BCS Learning and Development Ltd. Proceedings of HCI 2011 The 25th BCS Conference on Human Computer Interaction, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Proceedings of HCI 2011 The 25th BCS Conference on Human Computer Interaction

Conference acronym: HCI

Conference number: 25

Conference location: Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK

Conference date: 4 - 8 July 2011

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: Human Computer Interaction

Product

Product Information: 1477-9358BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/HCI2011.65

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

Categories

Series title: Electronic Workshops in Computing