Interactions - September/October 2010

the service of collating meaningful digital materials over time. Another area of concern lies in designing interactive systems that can deliver this kind of content to receivers in more elegant and expressive ways. On the one hand, there are clear opportunities for designing interactive tool sets for attributing rich annotations to sentimental materials in anticipation of their inheritance. On the other, we can imagine a new space of interactions opening up for the receiver that would make sense of this kind of collection and perhaps inscribe another layer of value onto the memories and legacy it signifies. Moreover, designing an engaging space for loved ones to construct shared value from their digital inheritance might relieve the sense of burden and invoke the social relationships implicated in these materials in much more appropriate and satisfying ways.

Designing interactions with
Possessions in Deep Storage
The diverse ways in which people
managed relationships with
departed loved ones were often
reflected in how they stored and
presented physical and digital
possessions in their homes. In
some cases, people possessed
objects that remained troubling,
such as posthumously received
handwritten letters or collections
of digital documents and photos
that the departed had arranged
to be passed on after their death.
Whether concealing physical
objects in a desk drawer or bury-
ing digital files deep within the
directory structure, great care
was taken to both preserve and
hide away these possessions.
Despite their troubling qualities,
these things remained signifi-
cant, and it was crucial for own-
ers to know their location and
be assured of their safety, even
though the materials were hid-
den out of sight. However, there
was no readily accessible way for
people to explicitly differentiate
these digital possessions from
other content within the system.

[ 4] Coelho, M. et al. 2009. “Programming Reality: From Transitive Materials to Organic User Interfaces,” 4759–4762. In Proc. of CHI ’09. New York: ACM Press, 2009.