Supporting Rich User Interactions with Digital Content in Everyday Life

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Family members share memories and stories with each other in a collocated fashion using material objects to collectively remember and reminiscence on past experiences. Today, family members accumulate vast collections of digital data (e.g., photos, video, audio, social media content) that captures their experiences, and can potentially be used as rich resources to support familial reminiscence. Yet, the lack of persistent form and presence of digital data can make family members experience their digital content as invisible and inaccessible. The central problem is that technology today does not fully support family members in using their digital collections in social practices of reminiscence in ways that are embodied, causal, spontaneous, and implicit. My proposed research explores the development and evaluation of a new design approach called domestic data interiors to address these challenges. This research investigates how the familiar forms, affordances, and tangible manipulability of everyday things such as furniture, objects, and interior fixtures can be embedded with digital functionality (e.g., sensing, actuation, and connectivity) to better enable families to engage, share, and interact with social data in the home. I will begin by designing and developing a robust, programmable technical platform for integrating connectivity, sensing, and a range of output modalities in customized domestic objects. In parallel, I will conduct laboratory-based studies with users to develop baseline heuristics for supporting rich interactions with family digital content through domestic objects; and, then progressively work toward testing more sophisticated user scenarios for data interior systems to support family reminiscence. After the iterative technical development work and user-scenario testing is complete, I will design, develop, and evaluate a series of research prototypes through field deployment studies in real-world contexts using mixed-methods evaluations. Together, this research will provide a detailed understanding of how new kinds of domestic technologies can be designed to enable digital content to function as rich everyday resources for families, along with new methods for building such advanced embedded systems for the home. This research has the potential to make significant advances in the fields of human-computer interaction, domestic computing, user interface design, and computer-supported cooperative work towards the realization of tangible computing and the Internet of Things. Companies are creating connected technologies for the home, but their products are limited by designing devices that users have little agency over and that do not integrate and support sustained user interaction in the home over time. Applications of my research have the potential to inform a new type of connected devices for families to engage with their data.