Sharing digital photographs in the home through physical mementos, souvenirs, and keepsakes
Michael Nunes, Saul Greenberg, Carman Neustaedter · 2008
People now easily share digital photos outside the home via web publishing and gift-giving. Yet within the home, digital photos are hard to access and lack the physical affordances that make sharing easy and opportunistic. To promote in-home photo sharing, we designed Souvenirs, a system that lets people link digital photo sets to physical memorabilia. These mementos trigger memories and serve as social instruments; a person can enrich their story-telling by moving the physical memento close to their large-format television screen, and the associated photos are immediately displayed. We implemented Souvenirs, and then re-examined our design premises through contextual interviews with 20 households. Families described their current practices of photo sharing and memento use, and also reacted to the Souvenirs design. Based on these interviews, we redesigned Souvenirs to better fit the real practices of photo and memento use in the home.