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Making Public Media Personal: Nostalgia and Reminiscence in the Office

Making Public Media Personal: Nostalgia and Reminiscence in the Office
Making Public Media Personal: Nostalgia and Reminiscence in the Office
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. We focus on an office environment, where the use of filtered public media may mitigate concerns over protecting privacy and disclosing too much of one's identity, while keeping the existing benefits of office personalisation 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.
reminiscence, nostalgia, identity, privacy, social engagement, workplace
André, Paul
be9fe144-3cf4-4aaf-9ddd-c37776b00831
Sellen, Abigail
befa1e72-cbb9-4e4a-bf72-f9610ea8bb6a
schraefel, m.c.
ac304659-1692-47f6-b892-15113b8c929f
Wood, Ken
ce6e9bd3-8fa6-4f1e-a3d1-79ecf418f479
André, Paul
be9fe144-3cf4-4aaf-9ddd-c37776b00831
Sellen, Abigail
befa1e72-cbb9-4e4a-bf72-f9610ea8bb6a
schraefel, m.c.
ac304659-1692-47f6-b892-15113b8c929f
Wood, Ken
ce6e9bd3-8fa6-4f1e-a3d1-79ecf418f479

André, Paul, Sellen, Abigail, schraefel, m.c. and Wood, Ken (2011) Making Public Media Personal: Nostalgia and Reminiscence in the Office. BCS HCI 2011.

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

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. We focus on an office environment, where the use of filtered public media may mitigate concerns over protecting privacy and disclosing too much of one's identity, while keeping the existing benefits of office personalisation 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.

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More information

Published date: July 2011
Venue - Dates: BCS HCI 2011, 2011-07-01
Keywords: reminiscence, nostalgia, identity, privacy, social engagement, workplace
Organisations: Agents, Interactions & Complexity

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 272286
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/272286
PURE UUID: eaf58138-16ac-4b43-8345-6e85213652db
ORCID for m.c. schraefel: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-9061-7957

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 16 May 2011 15:42
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 03:16

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Contributors

Author: Paul André
Author: Abigail Sellen
Author: m.c. schraefel ORCID iD
Author: Ken Wood

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