Interactions - January/February 2011

to form an attachment and sense of commitment to objects and places with which we hold a long and meaningful connection. Grounded in the understanding that we build (or oppose) a sense of community and identity through a plurality of experiences, meanings, and affects, heritage practice shifts the focus of interaction design from the centrality of an individual experience to repeated and enduring interactions. This shift opens up questions [ 5]. How can we bring enduring participation and engagement to bear on the cultural work done by emerging technologies?

To those interested in digital memories, heritage practice offers the opportunity to expand their concerns from the technical and political issues of digital archiving to the social benefits of remembering and forgetting [ 6]. The organizational politics of preservation that influence the accessibility of archival records in the future remain important [ 7]. Heritage practice emphasizes how remembering is a way of coming together as a family, a community, or a society through the stories we tell and improvise—and through what we do not want to remember. This opens up the opportunity to reflect on what we must remember to be who we are now, debating on what factual records should be preserved and who should be deciding. But it emphasizes also the issue of how we might be in the future, and the need for technologies of memory to bring us together around matters of shared concern. We need to ask explicitly: Why and how should we remember [ 8]?

To those interested in social media, heritage practice offers a lens to understand the cultural and historical value of information shared and curated in a

spontaneous collection was pulled together by the Flickr community by using the tag “rosie the riveter” to describe photos of the Library of Congress that had been classified differently. Try a search for “rosie the riveter” in Flickr Commons. [ 3] The 25th Anniversary of the Bhopal gas leak is an interesting example of how social media such as Facebook and Wikipedia made possible a “remembering together” of the event that helped develop and reaffirm existing social solidarities; it also offered the possibility of new social connections between diverse people. This case is part of an ongoing virtual ethnographic study conducted by Ph.D. candidate Sophia B. Liu at the Connectivity Lab, University of Colorado, Boulder, directed by Prof. Leysia Palen. Try a search for “bhopal gas leak” in Facebook. [ 4] For example, “Silence of the Lands” is a project that enables people to capture sonic experiences of the natural environment and use them as conversation pieces of a social dialogue about the places they share. Participants capture their sonic experiences with a GPS-equipped recording device and then create, annotate, and share soundscapes of the places where sounds were recorded. The result is an acoustic map that changes over time, according to people’s shared perceptions and interpretations of their environmental setting. See Giaccardi, E. and Palen, L. The social production of heritage through cross-media interaction: Making place for place making. International Journal of Heritage Studies 14, 3 (2008), 281-297. [ 5] Some of these questions were recently addressed in a workshop exploring emerging design inquiries in the heritage domain. Giaccardi, E. and Iversen, O. Heritage inquiries: A designerly approach to human values. Proc. of the Eighth ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems. (Aarhus, Denmark, Aug. 16-20). ACM, New York, 2010, 436-437. [ 6] Bannon, L. J. Forgetting as a feature, not a bug: The duality of memory and implications for ubiquitous computing. CoDesign 2, 1 (2006), 3-15. [ 7] Van House, N. and Churchill, E. Technologies of memory: Key issues and critical perspectives. Memory Studies 1, 3 (2008), 295-310. [ 8] See recent work on the design opportunities of interacting with inherited digital materials. Odom, W., Banks, R., and Kirk, D. Reciprocity, deep storage, and letting go: Opportunities for designing interactions with inherited digital materials. interactions 17, 5 (2010), 31-34. [ 9] Liu, S. B. Trends in distributed curatorial technology to manage data in a networked world. UPGRADE Journal 11, 3 (2010), 18-24.

“socially distributed” fashion across a multitude of technological devices and infrastructures [ 9]. Particularly in times of crisis and disaster, when the breakdown of social significance impels communal activities of recovery and solidarity, heritage practice offers also a vocabulary to understand the long-term role of social media in support of community identity and resilience. How can the next generation of social-media tools unbury the value hidden in the living experiences and memories of ordinary citizens and communities? How can we enable people to organize, interpret, and share what matters to them from the bottom up, and use it for positive social change? This leads to the more fundamental question: What is a positive social change? As designers, how should we address the differences and conflicts in what is valued that exist among different people and groups?

More generally, heritage practice teaches us that values are not attached to objects, buildings, or places. Neither are they frozen in time. They are the result of ongoing and sustained interactions. As we naturally and continually reinvent ourselves and our cultural affiliations, the heritage value we ascribe to things—both sociocultural and economic—is subject to change and renewal. We need to always be mindful: With the power to shape our interpretation of the past will come the ability to shape our visions of the future.

Submissions are welcome.

endnotes

[ 1] For projects and approaches, see Ciolfi, L., Cooke, M., Hall, T., Bannon, L. J. and Oliva, S., eds. Re-thinking Technology in Museums: Towards A New Understanding of People’s Experience in Museums, Univ. of Limerick, 2005. [ 2] Rosie the Riveter is a good example of story around women workers during War World II. This

About the Author

Elisa Giaccardi is an associate
professor for the Institute of
Culture and Technology at
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.
She graduated in 2003 from the
January + February 2011