Critical journal

DIGITAL INFORMATION AS AN HEIRLOOM CRITICAL JOURNAL

DIGITAL INFORMATION AS AN HEIRLOOM

Rahul Boggaram MA Industrial Design 2013 Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design

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Increasingly individuals are characterised by a body of digital information, and that information needs to live on for over a period of decades, the rest of our lives beyond the life time of any device you might have. So everybody is going to need somebody to be the custodians of their information. Just like we don’t put our money under the mattress anymore, we put it in the bank. So most of us will become a customer of information bank.

Paul Martiz of V.M.Ware

JULY July 2012

Personal Insight

This project started when an unexpected gift came to my door. I photographed every step of unpacking and uploaded these onto my social network page to show that it was from my parents who had never used the Internet before and learnt how to just to order a gift for their son living abroad. It was truly a memorable moment, a moment I wanted to preserve; I wanted to convey the emotions I went through to my children. What grasped my attention was that the photograph did not attract any comments or likes on my social network page. I realised that something that was immensely meaningful to me was not at all of interest to my friends.

Being a custodian of an heirloom, I was inspired to understand the differences between my personal object with its emotional durability and a mundane ephemeral object. With knowledge of tangible heirlooms, a similar approach to digital life might create longevity for digital possessions, evocate memories, convey stories, create a sense of burden and outlive a person.

Documenting the process of unpacking an unexpected gift

Write Up - Facebook forces everyone to switch in to Timeline

Key points that might influence my project

Still Protesting article on TechCrunch

OCT October 2012

Hypothesis

How can virtual data be ethically passed to future generations that they value?

MA Industrial Design Project Proposal

Unit 2 Project Plan

name

Rahul Boggaram date

05/10/2012 title

Virtual Heritage aim

Create value to digital content that the future generations will inherit. research question

How can virtual data (E.g.: ITunes music and apps, Amazon Books, Google mail, Google docs & apps, Dropbox, blogs and websites) be ethically passed to future generations that they value? intended audience

Consumers and Companies handling customer’s digital data. key areas of investigation

• • • • • • • • • role of the project in your personal development?

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• • • • •

Interaction design Precedents in different culture on how they passed their objects to generations Opportunities to bring value to the virtual content Smart Materials User experience Eco system to allow data customisation Digital rights management (DRM) To portray experience and expression in the digital content Interaction and industrial design precedents

Ability to systematically implement and evaluate a range of research techniques and methodologies in my practice.

Capacity to locate a specific problem or issue within an appropriate context and to engage in an iterative process of experimentation and critical appraisal.

Design proposals that communicate in a form appropriate to intended audiences.

Ability to synthesize research into design proposals.

Skills of self-direction, experimental and informed decisionmaking in tackling and solving problems Ability to effectively locate myself within the discipline and profession A niche market to start an occupation.

Absence of methods to ethically inherit virtual data (e.g; without passing passwords) Lack of value to digital content objectives and methods

01. To explore precedents in different culture of how and what was passed to next generations?

I want to address this with cultural probes and interviews of people from different cultures and backgrounds.

02. Analyse metaphors that assist to develop emotions and experiences in interacting with inherited content?

Mapping all the interviews and data from cultural probes 03. To research what the kids of Internet generation value?

Interviews and personas 04. To investigate what memories do current digital parents want to pass on to their next generations?

Questionnaires 05. Investigate available smart materials that might provide opportunities to develop new interactions?

Market research 06. Study existing interactions in data sharing Market research 07. Investigate existing DRM rights?

Case studies of different companies who handle users data and industry partnerships.

08. Investigate precedents in industrial and interaction design to develop interactive and desirable user experience?

Prototyping and testing 09. Analyse different methods to customise data?

Analysing questionnaires of what digital parents what to give and develop user interfaces 10. Develop interactions express emotions and stories through iterative making.

11. Produce a generative object and interaction that express the whole concept of the project and also engages intended audience

Â

role of submissions

Project proposal – Project plan document Design element – Physical manifestation of the object might be a generative object that engages intended audiences while they experience the concept.

Written Element – A brief of design output Critical Journal – A book that documents the whole process of research, analysis, experimentation and design proposals, including photographs, interviews, surveys, prototyping and Photos of people engaging with design element.

Mapping

Problem identified Broad project, unclear ideas and concepts. Planning and scoping needed to explore and define the project better.

Methodology Mind Mapping - When a topic or a problem has many parts, mind mapping provides a method of visually organising a problem space in order to better understand the problem and their related topics.

An existing diagram form google images

Project Mapping

Evaluation Key areas of investigation mapped to analyse and make sense of the identified problem and their interconnecting subjects.

Narrative and Typology

Problem identified Broad project, unclear ideas and concepts.

Methodology introduction Narrative and typology helps in making decisions about the location, scope and implications of the project and secondly its helps provide direction and meaning to your research activity.

Typology chosen - Book, A most commonly known physical object that is preserved for a long time.

In this part of my project i tried to explore, what are the characteristics in an object that make them valuable in their retrospective sense?

Evaluation Patina effect, annotations, dog eared pages, handwriting, turn of phrase, fragility of an object and care taken makes an object valuable to inherit. These characteristics communicate the time they belong to and create facts that give control over space and time.

Reference - Vault by Laurens Manders

Eindhoven designer Laurens Manders has created this lumpy safe for stashing possessions with sentimental value.

Called Vault, the piece of furniture has five drawers and is made of lacquered steel with walnut legs. Valuable worthless vault in which you can treasure your personal richness.

In this project I am trying to find out what value really is, by questioning myself which ‘things’ are of real value to me. I found out that for me most of it is about family, friendship and love.

Things that, as much as you want, you can’t really put in a safe.

Only ‘things’ that remind you about your value can be kept safe. This is why in the vault there are only five small drawers in which you can put photos, letters and tiny objects. Realizing that some ‘objects that carry emotion’ are even smaller or much larger, the vault project will be continued.

This vault’s appearance is inspired by the mineral pyrite, also known as fool’s gold. Because of its resemblance to gold pyrite is often mistaken to be highly valuable being actually almost worthless. This now resembles my vision on value. You can steal the vault and/or its ‘valuable’ contents but you will find out that it’s of no value to you.

Vault by Laurens Manders

Reading - Above the cloud

Boris Meister, the author of the book says: I treat this complex subject to explain it by creating a coherent object, both in its structure, its images or its layout. I play with the general idea of the atlas in which I introduce different visual languages (associations of images, illustrations, data visualization, text) to create an “atmosphere� favorable to the understanding of the subject. The result is a book-object that would have several levels of interpretation.

Evaluation “Above the Cloud� by Boris Meister is a map about social networks archeology, death and digital footprints left in misery.

Reading - The book of sand

The Invisible value when i read ‘The Book of Sand (El Libro de Arena) by Jorge Luis Borges, Translated by Anagrammatically Correct.com’

Book of Sand reminds me of World Wide Web. It adds up to the count of losing the number of times sitting in front of my computer to look up for some information, finding myself sitting hours later reading unrelated to what i initially wanted to find.

Reading - The blue ocean strategy

My perception of blue ocean strategy

Don’t compete in an existing market space; create a new one without any competition. Don’t try to fight for demonstrated demand; build new demand. Kim and Mauborgne render competition irrelevant and provide tools any company can use to create its own blue ocean.

New working hypothesis

I was introduced to the word ‘Heirloom’ during our project scenario discussion in a personal tutorial with Dr Stephen Hayward, which redefined my working hypothesis from, How can virtual data be ethically passed to future generations that they value? to

By studying analogue heirlooms we learn about the possible necessities relating to digital information as an heirloom.

Project Scenario

I grew up in a generation of letters, photo albums, cassettes and CD before arriving to the age of hyper-connectivity and digital assets. Many people have tangible objects that are handed down to evocate memories. We inherit them not for their monetary value or artistic quality, but for their associated stories. Heirlooms carry this intangible value of outliving a person and evoking memories, allowing beneficiaries to reminisce about the past.

We are now embracing new kinds of possessions. Increasingly, digital technologies, cloud services and social networks are part of everyday living. We are recording what we do, where we are, whom we are with, what we like and more in digital forms via different cloud services. If people were to be selective in preserving and ethically bequeathing digital assets like physical heirlooms, current solutions would appear limited and/or unethical.

How can we enable users to be selective in preserving, inheriting and ethically bequeathing digital possessions in their authentic form? How can we unpack these experiences to offer stimuli and create meaningful recall in inherited digital content?

Project Scenario - Draft 02

Project Title

Design Precedence

Digital remains Michele Gauler

Access key to the digital remains of a deceased person.

The digital remains lie on-line, in the cloud, where loved-ones log onto every now and then in order to remember the person they mourn for.

The Digital Remains access keys are physical objects that link to the digital legacy of a person.

They rotate when the user logs on to the digital remains of a person.

Cloud Interface

Access Key

Evaluation A speculative project and an incomplete concept.

How and when would a user upload digital assets on to this device? When do you pass them on? How and when would they receive a password? Why cant it be just another hard disk? Why does the on-line interface ask for password when the beneficiary receives a tangible key which is a right provided by the deceased to have non restricted access to the bequest content? Why will i want to have the content left by the deceased that i am not emotionally attached?

Design Precedence

Technology heirlooms by Richard Banks for Microsoft Future heirlooms theme is all about what it means to live with digital stuff for a long time. Author is talking 40+ years, and possibly to a point where we start thinking about passing on our digital objects and files to our offspring.

Richard Banks states that,’ We don’t tend to think of technology in those sorts of terms, although we tend to take that length of time for granted when it comes to physical artefact’s like paper photos. These projects are Time-card, the Backup Box and the Digital Slide Viewer.

Time-card is a personal timeline object. It’s like a digital photo frame, except the content is structured by time, and is all about one person.

Timecard

Interface

A Digital Slide Viewer, Imagine you have a relative who uses Flickr for much of their life. One day they pass away.

Would you want to inherit their account, with all of its responsibilities, or do you really just want the content to be able to use for reminiscing about the person? I think I might want the latter.

Digital slide viewer

The Backup Box is a concept device backing up the content of Twitter feed. It’s an object of reassurance that the message I’m putting on-line will also persist offline.

Backup Box

Backup Box

Evaluation These are speculative research objects to try and understand how people think about issues like reminiscing and their family’s history.

They raised in me the questions and thoughts of how and when would a user upload digital assets on to this device? When do you pass them on? Why will i bequeath all my tweets or flickr photos? Why will i want to have the content left by the deceased that i am not emotionally attached? How can a user be selective about his assets he chooses to leave behind? How can i pass on to multiple heirs?

Design Precedence

Pragmatic ways in use of bequeathing digital possessions Preserving Digital Memories

How do you make digital pictures, important electronic documents and digital home movies last?

You have to make important decisions and actively manage your digital files for them to last long enough to pass them to future generations. The Library of Congress has some tips to help you get started:

Identify what you want to save

Decide what is most important to you

Where are the files that you create located? On your computer? On your camera?

Online? Are they scattered around on unmarked CDs?

Select the images, e-mails, and documents that have long-term value to you and your family. If there are multiple versions of the same file save the highest quality version

Gather everything that you want to collect into one place.

Organize the content Create a consistent organizational structure.

Create a main archive folder and title it something like, “My Archive.” If you want to organize your files further, create other folders inside the master folder and name them with simple titles such as “video,” “photos” or “documents.”

Make copies and manage them in different places

Manage your archive over time

Make at least two copies of your archive folder—more copies are better. One copy can stay on your computer or laptop; put other copies on separate media such as DVDs, portable hard drives, or Internet storage and store the extra copies in different geographic locations.

Be sure to check your saved files at least once a year to make sure you can read them.

Plan to migrate your archive every few years to a new computer or storage system.

Want to learn more? Go to www.digitalpreservation.gov/you

CD & DVD

Memory card

Hard drive

National digital information infrastructure suggest people to archive in multiple locations and in multiple formats to preserve digital memories.

Evaluation These are some of the practical methods people have employed to bequeath digital assets.

Most of these formats are obsolete or will be obsolete by improvements in technology as better, faster and cheaper devices will invade of lives by time and when the beneficiary wants to reminisce or look back in to their inherited possessions .

Design Precedence

Bequeathing monetarily digital possession

Legacy Locker, helps users pass on passwords and usernames to any beneficiary. Plus, Legacy Letters let you send a special message to the beneficiary.

Legal Will drafted by authorised solicitor with usernames and password with a beneficiary name.

Why Now?

Stone Age In paleolithic times, mostly animals were painted, in theory ones that were used as food or represented strength, such as the rhinoceros or large cats (as in the Chauvet Cave). Signs such as dots were sometimes drawn. Rare human representations include hand prints and half-human/half-animal figures.

Bhimbetka Cave paintings The Bhimbetka rock shelters are an archaeological site of the Paleolithic, exhibiting the earliest traces of human life on the Indian subcontinent, and thus the beginning of the South Asian Stone Age. It is located in the Raisen District in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. The Bhimbetka shelters exhibit the earliest traces of human life in India. At least some of the shelters were inhabited by Homo erectus more than 100,000 years ago.[1][2] Some of the |Stone Age]] rock paintings found among the Bhimbetka rock shelters are approximately 30,000 years old.

[3] The caves also deliver early evidence of dance.

Bronze Age The Bronze Age is a period characterized by the use of copper and its alloy bronze and proto-writing, and other features of urban civilization.

Late 3rd Millennium BC silver cup from Marvdasht, Fars, with linear-Elamite inscription.

Evaluation In stone age people carved paintings in their caves. Since the Bronze Age people have embedded meaning into tangible mediums like artefact’s. Around the fourth millennium BC writing became a more dependable method of recording. Photography was another medium often used to record moments from the early nineteenth century as it captured more detail than any other traditional medium. Custodians have preserved the most valuable of these in their authentic forms. We are now embracing new kinds of possessions. People born before 1990, will be the only immigrants who had to adopt digital technologies to some extent in their life and will be the only once to distinguish a world without technology. Increasingly, digital technologies, cloud services and social networks are part of everyday living. We are recording what we do, where we are, whom we are with, what we like and more in digital forms via different cloud services. By enabling continual real-time conversations, today’s digital technologies are inevitably creating detailed logs of our pasts: ‘By the end of 2011 there were 1 billion people actively using social networking sites’ (Digital legacy presented at TED Global, 2011). The fact that such figures are growing before us means that we are also implicated in this phenomenon. Such data constitutes a rich collection of a person’s traits and their memories; we are a cloud generation.

Write Up - The rise of visual media

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“Blogs were one of the earliest forms of social networking where people were writing 1,000 words,” says Dr. William J. Ward, Social Media professor at Syracuse University. “When we moved to status updates on Facebook, our posts became shorter. Then micro-blogs like Twitter came along and shortened our updates to 140 characters. Now we are even skipping words altogether and moving towards more visual communication with social-sharing sites like Pinterest.”

Reading - From Use to Presence

Notes & Quotes

From Use to Presence: On the Expressions and Aesthetics of Everyday Computational Things by Lars Hallnäs , Johan Redström Meaningful presence - “Use” and “presence” represents two perspectives on what a thing is.

While “use” refers to a general description of a thing in terms of what it is used for, “presence” refers to existential definitions of a thing based on how we invite and accept it as a part of our life world. If we ask for the use of a chair, we ask for the purpose with having a chair, what we use chairs for, etc. If we instead ask about the presence of a particular chair in someone’s living room, we are not interested in what chairs in general, or even this particular chair, can be used for, but in the role and meaningfulness of this particular chair as present in this person’s life.

(Hallnas & Redstrom, 2002).’

NOV November 2012

Reading - Evocative objects

Notes & Quotes

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What imposes obligation in the present received and exchanged, is the fact that the thing received is not inactive. Even when it has been abandoned by the giver, it still possesses something of him. . . . In all this [giving and receiving] there is a succession of rights and duties to consume and reciprocate, corresponding to rights and duties to offer and accept. Yet this intricate mingling of symmetrical and contrary rights and duties ceases to appear contradictory if, above all, one grasps that mixture of spiritual ties between things that to some degree appertain to the soul, and individuals, and groups that to some extent treat one another as things.

All these institutions express one fact alone, one social system, one precise state of mind: everything—food, women, children, property, talismans, land, labour services, priestly functions, and ranks—is there for passing on, for balancing accounts.

Everything passes to and fro as if there were a constant exchange of a spiritual matter, including things and men, between clans and individuals, distributed between social ranks, the sexes, and the generations.

— Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies

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But how can we retrace our steps? Isn’t the modern world marked by the arrow of time? Doesn’t it consume the past? Doesn’t it break definitively with the past? . . . Hasn’t history already ended? By seeking to harbor quasi-objects at the same time as their Constitution, we are obliged to consider the temporal framework of the moderns. Since we refuse to pass “after” the [postmodern], we cannot propose to return to a nonmodern world that we have never left, without a modification in the passage of time itself.

— Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern

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A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a use-value, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it satisfies human needs, or that it first takes on these properties as the product of human labour. It is absolutely clear that, by his activity, man changes the forms of the materials of nature in such a way as to make them useful to him.

The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.

— Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy

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Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.

— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate Places

Objects of history and exchange The Bracelet - Irene Castle McLaughlin

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Silver, gold, shell, stone: my jewelry basket is organized according to these objective, formal properties, these visual markers and guides for ready access. Like any collection, my jewelry could just as easily be sorted by age, value, place of origin, or even by color. There is another underlying narrative that is known only to me. In the context of that story—my life story—these objects are heirlooms, gifts, invocations.

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I reach for an old Navajo cuff bracelet when I want to invoke the spirits of my female ancestors and allies.

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My bracelet evokes that world of wood smoke, lambs, and matrilineal clans.

The Vacuum Cleaner - Nathan Greenslit

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Indeed, part of what was so scary to Emma about the vacuum’s loudness was that it evoked not so much the question of what this thing was, but rather who this thing might be. For Emma, the vacuum was something that needed to be dealt with like a person.This is one version of Freud’s uncanny—things known of old yet somehow unfamiliar—that we as persons, who spend a lifetime trying to fantasize our way out of being children, can’t help but see ourselves in our own children. We say it is cute that children have “unreal” relationships with objects. But just past this, is what’s evocative

Objects of mourning and memory The SX-70 Instant Camera - Stefan Helmreich

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I became more and more impressed with the power of the subconscious. . . . If you put good input into your subconscious, that is, carefully observed results and carefully thought-out analyses, and let some good hard facts into your subconsciousness, along with the need to know the answers to some problems or the need to invent the way out of some difficulties, then sometimes further focusing and work wasn’t as helpful as just a little time, or a change of scene, or a stimulus of another sort [which] would sometimes bring the answer.

Salvaged Photographs - Glorianna Davenport

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I stare at the first photograph that I have pulled out of a small cardboard box labeled “Glorianna to make copies.” It is a picture of my father in his youth by a lake with a dog. I never knew my father had a dog. Three years ago, I promised my siblings that I would digitize a large collection of memorabilia—images and videos. For this, I recently added a scanner to my image-processing setup at our cranberry farm. My promise still unfulfilled, guilt is balanced with the anticipation of new discoveries. As I continue to muse, the image of my father is transformed into bits.

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The small cardboard box is filled with an unruly group of most-wanted photographs selected by my siblings as we painstakingly divided up family heirlooms after selling my mother’s house in 1999. My mother did not choose to be part of these final decisions.

She already had her fill of dealing with the remains of her family heritage ten years earlier, when the house my grandparents had built in the 1930s—in which we had spent our childhood summers, and into which my parents moved after my grandparents passed away—was consumed by a devastating fire.

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The reaction of survivors to the sudden and near total loss of personally meaningful possessions can create a sort of frenzy. In our family, my mother and all of her children contributed to clearing and then to combing the site, carefully freeing larger and smaller artifacts from the debris of our lost home. For the two months following the fire, we each, at different times, searched the charred remains for anything that might be recoverable and threw the rest into a large dumpster.

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The editing function allows us to pick, choose, and modify content as we examine each image for its evocative value. These early explorations served me well in my adult career as I moved into film and interactive video, seeking a better understanding of how stories are made and shared.

The process of recovering from the house fire has brought me in touch with old lessons: not all documents are worth salvaging, but most are, and photographs are particularly valuable to later generations of a family, allowing them evidence to better reconstruct the tale of their past.

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I will no doubt digitize all the images that were “most wanted,” but when it comes to printing and framing the “story,” I will be more selective. The editor in me, picking through the debris after the fire, is uniquely positioned.

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Having found the charred but no longer functioning Polaroid camera, I could choose, if reluctantly, to relegate it to the dumpster as I now can navigate through its images, developed, digitized, and jostling for position in some future album.

The Rolling pin - Susan Pollak

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As I use her rolling pin and feel its texture and weight against my floured hands, I think of the hundreds of pies and cookies it helped create. It anchors me in the past, yet continues to create memories for the future. The object becomes timeless. Marcel Proust gives us deeper insight into the nature of the evocative object. In Remembrance of Things Past he describes an epiphany evoked by a madeleine, a small, scalloped cake: “dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. . . . A shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses.”

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Evocative objects can hold the “vast structure of recollection.” This is more than poetic construction

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The object can hold an unexplored world, containing within it memory, emotion, and untapped creativity. As a psychologist, I inhabit multiple worlds. Through transference and countertransference, I have a special relationship to the stories, dreams, and objects of others. Working with my patients, I become both translator and participant/observer of their inner landscape. When a case deeply engages me, the objects and stories of others assume weight in my world, inhabiting my thoughts and imagination.

Reading - Emotional design by Donald.A.Norman

Notes and important quotes

Objects that evoke memories •

True, long lasting emotional feelings take time to develop: They come from sustained interaction.

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Surface appearance and behavioural utility play relatively minor roles. Instead, what matters is the history of interaction, the association people have with the objects, and the memories they evoke.

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Yogiberra put it this way,”Nobody goes there anymore. Its too crowded.”Or translating this to design,”Nobody likes kitsch, its too popular.”Yup, if too many people like something, there must be something wrong with it. But isn’t that very popularity telling us something? We should stop to consider why it is popular. People find value in it. It satisfies some basic needs. Those who deride kitsch are looking at wrong aspects.

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Emotions reflect our personal experiences, associations and memories.

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Special objects turned out to be those with special memories are associations, those that evoke a special feeling.

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What mattered was the story, an occasion recalled.

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We become attached to things if they have a significant personal association, if they bring to mind pleasant comforting moments. Our attachment is really not to the thing, it is to the relationship, to the meaning and feelings that the things represent.

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“Miniature Moments” San Fransisco airport- was about the role of souvenirs in evoking memories. The items were not on display for their artistic quality, But to applaus their sentimental value, For the memories evoked and in brief, for the emotional impact on their owners.The text accompanied the exhibition described the role of souvenir monuments thusly: The marvel of souvenir building is that the identical miniature sparks in each of us extravagantly different webs of remembrance.

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As i strolled around i was most attracted to souvenirs of places i had visited myself, perhaps they bought back memories of those visits.

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Photographs, more than almost anything else, have a special emotional appeal: They are personal, They tell stories.

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A lot of pictures are taken, not all the films get developed, of the film that is developed, some of it is never looked at, Of the pictures that are looked at , Many are simply put back into the envelope and then filled away in a box, never to be looked at again.

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People have been known to rush back into burning homes to save treasured photographs.

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Memories reflect our life experiences

Parts of me online sketches

System Mapping - Draft 01

Description A family restricted service, Where every family member can have their own account.

Possessors who would want to bequeath digital assets can upload their assets to their selected heirs and the heirs are the new custodian of those assets and when they choose to revisit the possessions are composed in a narrative to convey heirs the story before and after the particular event.

Design Iteration - Draft 01

Curators Interface Possessor can select an heir in their family and hand down a personal asset or a possession on social network or embed a link which is open on the Internet for everyone to view.

Viewers Interface A composed narrative is automated by the service for the Heirs or a beneficary to understand the whole story and give sense of their ancestors personality.The beneficary can view into each file individually by double clicking on a particualr content.

Evaluation This is an equivalent of a legal will curation but in digital realm. But why would the beneficiary value all the possessions received? How can the beneficiary be selective of the things he is emotionally related to? How can the authenticity be preserved and communicated?

Write Up - Celebrity Scenario - Bruce Willis Vs Apple case study

Bruce Willis is eyeing a legal bid to ensure he can ethically bequeath his $40,000 worth of i Tunes library to his children.

The article states, “Lots of people will be surprised on learning all those tracks and books they have bought over the years don’t actually belong to them,” solicitor Chris Walton told the Mail.

“It’s only natural you would want to pass them on to a loved one. The law will catch up, but ideally Apple and the like will update their policies and work out the best solution for their customers.”

Bruce Willis had some suggestions on twitter of the possibilities to bequeath

Evaluation This article was amended a week later after Willis’s wife denied on Twitter that he is considering any such legal moves. But the question of how can we ethically bequeath our digital assets remain?

My Digital Life: Bar Camp

The format was very informal. The whole group (approx 25) split into four groups and conducted informal presentations for an hour. We came together as a whole group at the end to feedback key points of the discussions.

Tatiana is a self-confessed ‘geek’ working with graphic design, illustration & comics. She uses notebooks, i pad, i phone - and says there is no difference between digital and non-digital tools. She uses loads of different applications to experiment - it’s a digital sketchbook. The online and the offline are totally mixed.

She demonstrated her augmented reality books made using the Aurasma app.

I had my Design iteration- Draft 01 printed to discuss among the group. I described my project by asking how we might manage our personal heritage in the digital environment. We are taking hundreds of photos everyday, Creating different kinds of digital assets, How many and which ones am I going to leave for my future generations? What makes a meaningful story when the story teller has passed away?

This led to a broader discussion about managing quantities of data, ‘curating’ our histories, deciding what to share and what to keep private, and the need for some form of navigation through data excess. We also discussed how changes in technology impact how we think about memory.

Evaluation Key themes •

Processes of selection/curation/data management & the politics governing this online

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The impact of technology on human processes such as remembering

Questions raised How is memory constructed? Where is memory stored? What is the nature of recall in relation to the archive?

Questions of how trust, authenticity and originality be conveyed?

DEC December 2012

Write Up - 20 tech trends for 2013

We embrace a new type of patina, is one among the tech trends that was forecasted by Vice President of Creative, Software Innovation Paul Pugh, Frog design Austin.

Paul says, “A key aspect missing from the mobile experience today is the concept of patina, or the wearing that comes with regular use. In the physical world this might be the small scratch on an LP that occurred at a rocking party. This slight degradation in quality is actually part of the story and part of our culture. A new layered interaction model of touch, voice, and gesture will emerge as important as consumption: the continuous exchange of what we are doing, where we are, and who we are with. This will again work into the collective memory, attaching to our legacy—bringing in a new type of patina effect. It won’t be the same as physical degradation, yet will offer fresh stimuli that allow for more meaningful navigation and recall.”

System Mapping - Draft 02

A family restricted service, Where every family member can have their own account.

Possessors who would want to bequeath digital assets can upload their assets to their selected heirs and the heirs can pick up the possessions that they are personally related to be the new custodian but the once unselected will delete gradually.

The selected assets will be arranged in order of time and also by possessions that belong to the people involved in the event that is shown on the viewer.

Design Iteration - Draft 02

Curators Interface Possessor can select an heir in their family and hand down a personal asset or a possession on social network or embed a link which is open on the Internet for everyone to view.

Viewers Interface Heirs can pick up the possessions that they are personally related,to be the new custodian but the once unselected will delete gradually.

The selected assets will be arranged in order of time and also by possessions that belong to the people involved in the event that is shown on the viewer.

Evaluation The concept of digital termite was introduced to provide selection and to raise value of assets.

But this raised new questions of can some assets acquire value by time? Something that is not of importance now can acquire value by time and something that is instantly valuable can loose its personal connection? How can we create a meaningful recall into inherited possessions?

Missing attributes of a digital possession to be an heirloom

A key characteristic that is missing from any digital possession is the wear that comes with regular use. The erosion of an object is part of its story and this also communicates the time to which the object belongs. Digital possessions do not lose their lustre. This can be taken as an advantage when handing them down since recipients see the possession in exactly the same condition. Are they losing one of the key qualities of an heirloom, that of ‘signifying time,’ or do they still convey a time difference?

By searching through old digital comic posters an understanding of whether they convey the time they were from can be garnered. Tintin season one poster is the oldest and The adventures of Tintin is the newest.

Tintin season one

The Adventures Of Tintin

Evaluation Both clearly depict the time they belong to. First one is a two-dimensional outlined vector image with solid colours. Second one is a three-dimensional image with shading and shadows and is close to the realistic rendering of a character. A digital asset loses its lustre through improvements in technology but retains the communicative quality of conveying the time it belongs to.

What, Why, Who

What is it?

A virtual facility to bequeath intangible heirlooms, while conveying emotions that are traditionally expressed by tangible heritage.

Why am I doing this project?

Most of us have objects that belong to different generations of our family, passed on and again to future generations. We inherit them not for their monetary value or artistic quality, but mostly for the stories they own. Heirlooms carry this intangible value of outliving a person to evoke memories, allowing future to reminisce the past. These memories bring the responsibility of looking after and passing them on, with an additional task of curating our memories.

The heirlooms we have come across are mostly tangible, But increasingly our content is digital these days, this intangible content can also be of a certain value to inherit for their tales; as a digital immigrant how can I bequeath my intangible information, while conveying emotions that are traditionally expressed by tangible objects.

Who is it for?

Embracing digital life and curious to bequeath intangible content as heirlooms.

TED Talk - Digital legacy by Adam Ostrow

Notes & Quotes By the end of 2011 their are 1 billion people actively using social networks on our planet.

We are creating archives that are something completely different from anything that is ever created before.

Considering a few stats for am moment: 200 million tweets posted every day 90 pieces of content posted by an average facebook user

Ifidie.com was one of the creepy examples Adam mentions in his talk of how to plan a digital death.

Semantics

Heirlooms By definition, ‘The word has acquired a secondary and popular meaning of items of special, endearing value, such as furniture or pictures, handed down from one generation to the next’. The receiver of this kind of object is a custodian, in the sense that they do not individually own the object, they only borrow it.

Ethnography

Problem identified Understand the qualities of an heirloom better and deeper into existing practices to draw inspirations from everyday lives.

Methodology The literary meaning of ethnography is “Description of People�.

Interviews started with a structured script of questions, whilst discussing with the interviewer it was comfortable for both parties being conversational. The necessary information was collected by limiting the discussion to the main topic that the questionnaire required.

To understand the qualities of an heirloom, ethnography provides an obvious approach. The interviewers were selected from different cultures which helps with an understanding of what heirlooms mean to custodians from different cultures, thus allowing the location of universal characteristics.

Questionnaire

Tom Maisey Interview

Tom Maisey

Maisey’s Vice

1.Please list an important object that is passed through generations in your family?

A Vice from my great grandfather.

2. What does this object mean to you?

Great granddad passed this object on and I know this from my dad. It shows the working status of great granddad.

3.When and how did you receive them?

My dad knows my interest in making and also because other siblings were not interested in it as it did not have any monetary value. It also had notes along and it is stored and used like other tools we have. It was also renovated and reconditioned when necessary.

4.What kind of obligations does it carry?

It comes with an obligation to keep it in the family and to pass it to a person interested.

5.What is that one object you will pass on to your next generations of your family?

I am proud to pass on this vice to a family member interested in it.

John Villar Interview

John Villar

Villar’s Smoking Pipe

1. Please list an important object that is passed through generations in your family?

An object I personally connect myself to, is a smoking pipe from my grandfather.

2. What does this object mean to you?

When I was young my grandpa passed away I was afraid of loosing my family and I was also scared of death, every time I see these objects I keep them close to me because they give the feeling of keeping the person with me, when I look at the objects and pictures I have, I look at that moments I had in them and they help me understand the time passed, how we have been growing up, the context, we can see the cars and environment around which makes it something special. In terms of materials I think the real element that I get from them are we can not buy them, if we go to a shop we usual choose an object because we have connection to it, we like the style, we like design, we feel it suits our personality, But we do not look for these things in the objects we get from our family it naturally brings the connection to you because you know it belongs to some one that actually gave you, this is an exciting thing as it brings the value and history along with it which makes it special.

3.When and how did you receive them?

It naturally happened; my grandpa was too old and he did not want to smoke anymore and

he said if I wanted I can use it and I told him I would love to and I am thinking most beautiful part of that moment was that I said ‘you have to teach me how to use it, it was memory of he showing me how to light it and use it. I have my own style of using the pipe but it’s definitely related to the style he had when he was showing me how to use it that first time.

Looking at the pipe, we can get this pipe in an antique shop but that will not be what my grandpa used and it naturally comes with the fact that it is given by my grandpa.

4.What kind of obligations does it carry?

I have heard stories about it; I believe that my family expects to pass on my objects to my children but I don’t like to be attached to metaphysics thing and there will be no obligations any more. It’s just the way I am and I feel. I cannot see any reason to share with someone else, I am thinking in that senses that object bring special things to people using them or connected to them.

5.What is that one thing you will pass on to your next generations of your family and why?

I have these strange occasions somewhere young to try to teach people the little things I know; these occasions come because I do have admiration to people who taught me things, ultimately what makes me as a person is our experience and knowledge and all my life I was fascinated about knowledge. One of the very mystical experience not as a metaphysics but something with full of meaning that really attract me was when I was doing a PhD in philosophy, I got a lot of text from my professors about Nietzsche, Heidegger etc.; I heard what they say and I saw the notes my professors make about the book. As a good habit I completely write down ideas, the moment I read the book they are in the book, its interesting that when I read the same book 5 or 10 years later I have changed my mind, sometimes I use a different colour to make extra notes, you can see how my perceptions and ideas change by time, At certain point if I feel to pass on I would like to share my books with my notes.

6. Have you curated your will, if so when did you think of it?

No, I am not thinking about that because life is intense and the speed is fast and the importance things have been pushed away from the urgent things. Now u asked me, I am thing should I do this. It never came across in my mind because I am busy. I don’t see myself writing a will thinking to pass things to other people because I am perhaps too busy living the life and if I arrive to that age and the intensity drops down I will, may be more than writing a will I will start passing on things to people, its more beautiful to give from our own hands than putting it on a paper.

Dr Girish Boggaram Interview

Dr Girish Boggaram

Boggaram’s Utensil

1. Please list an important object that is passed through generations in your family?

Most important of the objects that I received is a utensil that is used to crush betel leaves and areca nut.

2. What does this object mean to you?

My granddad used to eat Paan, a traditional home made product in India consumed after every meal. This contains betel leaves and areca nuts. As he did not have teeth, I had to help him crushing the leaves and nuts everyday using this utensil, in exchange I used to receive a very small portion of it and some time to talk to him in person.

The utensil is a hyperlink to my memories of the way he lived.

3.When and how did you receive them?

I choose to have it because he had a sudden death and did not have a chance to ask him.

4.What kind of obligations does it carry?

It carries no obligations.

5.What is that one object you will pass on to your next generations of your family and why?

The utensil from my granddad is the only thing I can think of now because it carries the choices my granddad and me made.

6. Have you curated your will, if so when did you think of it?

Yes, I taught about it the day I taught I could die and I have to secure my estate and memories.

I was thinking about who deserves them and why, when I wrote it.

7.How often do you validate your will?

I have just done it once but I would like to validate it every five years.

Anton Kraus Interview

Anton Kraus

Kraus’s penset

1.Please list an important object that is passed through generations in your family?

A technical pen set I received from my grandfather.

2. What does this object mean to you?

I had huge memories with my grandfather based on writing letters because we did not leave in the same city. When together we spent a lot of time sketching and drawing.

This pen set evokes memories of me as a young boy learning to write old-fashioned German called Suetterlin from my granddad, which was important for me to learn and write the script, as it was a secret between two of us and my brother so we could react to the letters from him.

Only a few people can read this kind of scripts and it is not easy. This little secret brought us together.

I still use this style of German in writing to my brother to keep it alive and to reminisce those emotional moments with my granddad.

The pen set and the script are hyperlinks to remember my secret moments and experiences with my grand father.

3.When and how did you receive them?

I received them when my grandfather deceased .My aunt gave the pen set to me because she knew about the letters between us.

4.What kind of obligations does it carry?

It does not carry any obligations that I have to pass on materials in an old fashioned way but should pass on family values.

5.What is that one object you will pass on to your next generations of your family and why?

I don’t have any memories to pass on till now but if I did it would be about sharing my best moments and experiences in my life.

6. Have you curated your will, if so when did you think of it?

I have not taught about it but I can picture myself sitting at home as a grand dad.

Naresh Kumar Interview

Naresh Kumar

Kumar’s Jewellery Balance

1. Please list an important object that is passed through generations in your family?

Brass pan jewelry balance.

2. What does this object mean to you?

My great grand dad was a Pawnbroker in a small village, He ran out of business, which forced him to venture in to jewelry store. My family was facing financial crisis, my grand dad had to stop his job and get in to business to help his dad, he had to carry jewellery door to door to sell them and he needed a portable balance and they spent the last few rupees they saved on it.

The family was very comfortable their after.

Today this balance conveys the efforts he put and the family time he missed to keep all of us comfortable

3.When and how did you receive them?

I received them the day I joined my family business

4.What kind of obligations does it carry?

It carries only obligation that it should be passed on to a family member who joins their business.

5.What is that one object you will pass on to your next generations of your family and why?

Definitely this balance but I am thinking to pass on photographs of our store from different times because my children don’t know my granddad personally and they have no clue about the family past, The photographs might convey the change in our lifestyle and the importance of the object.

6. Have you curated your will, if so when did you think of it?

I have never thought about it, but I like the way my dad handed out his stuff to all my siblings and me, I would prefer that. It’s more personal and emotional.

Andrew Gordon Interview

Gordon’s Tartan kit

1. Please list an important object that is passed through generations in your family?

The Gordon family are a re known clan (family) name from Scotland. They have a coat of arms and a dress tartan which is recognised to belong to that specific family. Apart from the Heritage that one is from the Gordon clan there is no obligation upon us to uphold any specific view.

2. What does this object mean to you?

Most families have a pride or relationship with their ancestors. Where they came from what distinguished them from other families, profession or status etc. I understand we must respect from where we came from and if relevant to acknowledge the spirit of the ancestors to dealing with their beliefs at the time relevant to them.

For example A Scotish family or clan would imply they are not a welsh or English family by heritage and that they were once ruled as they are now by the Crown, the Queen. So the independence of Scotland to a scotish family may mean something whereas this may mean very little to a welsh family.

The only family Heir loom as such from personal belongings from my grandfather would be the Gordon Tartan kit I wore as a youth, which previously belonged to my father. At that time I lived in Ireland and they were not keen to see any association with the UK , ie Scotland as they were hostile to any suggestion Ireland was a part of the UK.

Therefore as I had a father and heritage from Scotland this has a fundamental effect on my relationship with my friends as they would see only evil / bad traits in the UK and any reference to them was with distant. I would have tried to use rational argument to paint a picture of what I saw as current UK position in relation to Ireland. For example I would wish that Peace could be agreed with the UK as I saw no real difference between that UK as a people and the Irish, in that neither wished to harm the other just both sides had stood for different political values but over time people were same in that they all saw no scene in fighting and no value in a persistent belligerance to each other, harmony was ultimately the goal even if this was with significant compromises by others.

3.When and how did you receive them?

Respectfully

4.What kind of obligations does it carry?

I do not believe it carries an obligation just a respect for elders views and deeds.

5.What is that one object you will pass on to your next generations and why?

Tartan kilt

6. Have you curated your will, if so when did you think of it?

No

7.How often do you validate your will?

Not often

8.Please feel free to write anything that is important to you that the questions havent covered.

I do not think I and the best example for your studies but it is factual. I have one brother and two sisters I am eldest so would assume the kilt would be passes to me automatically as I also have a son named after my father Ian (Scottish name).

Insights, Notes, Quotes & Evaluation out of ethnographic research

My Heirloom Girish R. Boggaram is my cousin and is 20 years older than me. We lived in a joint family with our grandparents. When I approached Girish to request if he could tell me about his most important heirloom he showed me this utensil. I was four years old when my grandfather passed away, so I hardly remember him. My parents had told me about a step on a staircase in our house where my grandfather sat after every lunch, overlooking the road, to eat paan. They also talked about a name (vaka sollu) used by my granddad to refer to his crushing utensil. It is an expression rarely used in our family. As soon as I saw the utensil that Girish had inherited I knew it belonged to my grandfather; he also referred to the utensil as vaka sollu. Nostalgia took me back to the staircase, which had a lot of scratches and dents on one step. The utensil Girish inherited had dents below, which was a cue for me to relate it to the other linked events that I was told about my grandfather. It was, in essence, a missing piece of a link to a story I partially knew and which I had stumbled upon because of this project. This allowed me to reconstruct the story of who my grandfather was as it embodies his personality. The scratches and dents were cues for already known locations and events.

Difference between my heirloom and an heirloom When I was talking to John and Anton about their heirlooms they were simply antique objects to me. Here the story or the object did not carry any emotional presence or familiarity for me: ‘It is not about what’s said. It is about what’s not said’ (Hayward to Boggaram, 2012).

John’s smoking pipe and Anton’s pen set convey the time they belong to in the quality, colour and fragility they exhibit. The patina on Anton’s pen set shouts of authenticity. The thumb impressions, scratches on the box and on the nibs show the amount of care taken and the context to which the object belonged. Annotations in a book, scratches on an LP and faded photographs are some other examples that are apparent on objects of authenticity. These are the features of any antique piece; they are the wear that comes with regular use. They also communicate the time to which it belongs. These facts create value and belief, which in return bring control over space and time.

Values in an Heirloom Obligation as value Heirlooms create a sense of burden and obligation. We cannot dispose of them as they are objects of embodiment. We would offend the memory and, in some way, they create the feeling of our ancestors’ presence. Andrew Gordon, who belongs to the Gordon family, a renowned clan from Scotland, inherited a Gordon Tartan kit as a family heirloom from among the personal belongings of his grandfather. He states, ‘I am the eldest so would assume the kilt would be passed to me automatically, as I also have a son named after my father Ian (Scottish name) and he is next in line for this kilt.’ (Gordon to Boggaram, 2012)

Validation as value Heirlooms go through constant validation checks every time we relocate, every time we clean our house, we check and recheck if the objects around us are still valid for being part of our lives. I suppose that hundreds of times my grandfather would have cleaned his room and disposed of unnecessary objects. The very reason the utensil that Girish inherited survived for a long time was because of the choice made to preserve it and the importance given to it by my grandfather; this gave the object exceptional value. This is the reason why ephemeral objects like receipts, train tickets, slips and more can also acquire emotional significance.

Different archiving methods noticed in ethnographic research

Possessions arranged in order of time

Possessions arranged by kind

Heirlooms preserved in shadow box

JAN January 2013

Persona

General Name Age

Tallulah Belle Willis

Walter Bruce Willis

19 yrs

58 yrs

Lifestyle Activities

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Likes pubbing , meeting new people and exploring new places. Spends a lot of time reading books, listening to music.

She also tags, blogs, tweets to share all her experience.

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• •

Ultimate Goal

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Goal is to start a career in the world of modeling. Keeping in touch to embrace trends.

Enjoys music and spends a lot of his money on it. Travels a lot to visit new locations.

Blogs, emails and embraces social networks to keep in touch with his fans, family and friends.

He always retains his old goods.

He hopes his kids live in an ethical society

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To make sure he conveys his best moments to his children and fulfill the responsibility of handing down his family possessions from his ancestors.

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Moderate but puts his efforts to stay informed of whats worth learning.

Technology Competence •

High and Up to date with the current trends.

Customer Base and their attributes

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Authenticity

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Ethical

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Originality

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Responsibility

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Custodianship

Notions •

Longevity

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Trust

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Selection

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Bequeath

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Preserve

Trends •

Digital Identity

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Cloud Generation

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Social Networks

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Emotional Durability

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Ethical Consumerism

Purpose •

Strengthening life span of personal memories

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Ethical bequeathing of digital information

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Digital information, which is generic, will be filtered to create an aura of personal quality; in return, selected possessions will develop longevity.

System Mapping - Draft 03

Description Our digital presence is spread between different services. This proposal is to enable the possessor to be selective to preserve their best moments. Digital information which is generic, will be filtered to create the aura of personal quality.

Design Iteration - Draft 03 - Viewers Mode (Linked events & Cues)

Description One among the universal characteristics of heirlooms is the ability of objects to embody a personality and how we infer events from the condition of an object in the manner of a detective interpreting clues in order to recollect a memory.

This design iteration was to design interface which contains cues generated for the possession viewed to give a meaning full recall into inherited assets by enabling the ability of custodian to infer events from the clues generated.

Paper prototyping

Evaluation How can the authenticity of the possession preserved? How are the cues generated? Are they automated or are they chosen when bequest?

References - Numerical Narratives by Nicholas Feltron

A 14 page infograph designed by Feltron to encapsulate his father’s life, as communicated by the calendars, slides and other artifacts in his possession.

Possessions Feltron inherited

First and last page of the report

Evaluation The report is a biography of feltrons father which includes mundanne things like marks sheets and train tickets to his occupation and his hobbies. A story very well conveyed.

Work in Progress

At the work in progress show, My display consisted of heirlooms from my interviewers and the stories associated to those objects.

I also raised a questions of how has intervention of technology changed the way we acquire our memories? does digital inforamtion have the qualities of physical object to be an heirloom?

Notes at Work in Progress show.

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Its not about the digital or physical, its about the stories we are attached to and emotional investment we make in the content.

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How can you control and preserve short lived assets?(e.g; content on social network)

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How can you bequest monetary assets?

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Significance of technology has enabled us to record the actual moment but before hyper connectivity stagged images were a trigger into memory. The actual memory is in me.

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Nick suggests to read The Gift by Marcel Mauss to draw deeper insights.

Reading - ‘The Gift’

Notes & Quotes In ‘The Gift’, Mauss (1924) explores gift-exchanges in various cultures and highlights the reciprocal nature of gifts and the obligation of the receiver to repay the debt. The object that is given carries the identity of the giver, and hence the recipient receives not only the gift but also the association of that object with the identity of the giver.

Mauss describes the Maori hau, which means the “spirit of the gift”. The hau demands that the gift be returned to its owner. Gift-giving is thus a critical mechanism for creating social bonds.

Mauss describes three obligations: •

Giving: the first step in building social relationships.

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Receiving: accepting the social bond.

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Reciprocating: demonstrating social integrity.

The Spirit of the thing given Taonga (An object or a natural resource which is highly priced) are closely attached with the individual or inherited family, they embody magical, religious and spiritual; powers. These objects have the power to destroy the receiver, if the obligation of making as return gift is not perceived.

They had a system of giving presents, which had later to be repaid or exchanged.

Hau, an object passed from person A and the person B the receiver and he decides to pass it to C, B gets something in exchange (Toanga), now this object is the spirit of the object I received from A. Now I must return the Toanga to A. If I were to keep this I will die or become ill, this is called Hau.

Every toanga has a hau, a spiritual power. The taonga or its hau itself is an individual, it constrains user to return some kind of gift(Toanga) of their own , some property or gifts equivalent or superior in values. Such a return will make its donor the new recipient. This shows the nature of bond created by the transfer of possessions. Since the object itself is a person or relates to person, Receiving something from someone is receiving a part of his spiritual essence. What ever the toanga is it retains a religious and magical holdover the recipient.

The Obligation to give and the Obligation to receive One gives away what is in reality a part of ones nature and substance, while to receive something is to receive a part of someones spiritual essence. To keep this thing is dangerous, because it come morally, physically and spiritually from a person. It retains a magical and religious hold over a recipent.

Reading - Subjective discourses of non functional system of objects

Notes & Quotes •

The way in which antiques refer to the past give them an exclusive mythological character

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Antiques have a specific function, namely “signifying of time’.

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Antique Objects Help us escape in time with the frame of reference to the present moment. Mythological object has minimal function and maximal meaning.

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Objects bear silent witness to this unresolved ambivalence. Some serve as mediation with the present, others as mediation with the past, the value of latter being that they address a lack.

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A part from the uses to which we put them at any particular moment, object in this sense have another aspect which is intimately bound up with the subject: No longer simply material bodies offering a certain resistance, they become things of which i am the meaning, they become my property.

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A utensil is never possessed, because a utensil refers one to the world: what is possessed is always an object abstracted from its function and thus brought in to the relationship witht the subject. In this context all owned objects part take of same abstractness and refer to one another only in as much as they refer solely to the subject.

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Every object thus has two functions - To be put to use and to be possessed.

Instagram moves to use your content in advertising without compensation

Key points that might influence my project

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According to AppStats, a statistics tool for Facebook applications, 17 December saw 16.35 million daily active users uploading to the photo sharing platform but that figure falls to around 7.41 million on 14 January.

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The proposed changes made headlines on 18 December and implied users would be granting Instagram a license to use uploaded content in advertising as well as permitting Instagram to share user information across the Facebook business. 18 December is also the date which sees a massive dip in daily users to just 5.2 million.

Reading - Emotional Durability by Jonathan Chapman

Notes & Quotes

Attachments with objects •

Honeymoon period, the passionate early stages of a subject-object relationship [...]. Honeymoon periods are by their very nature short lived. During recent years, consumers have become serious honeymooners and today subject-object relationships are less marriage, more one-night stand’

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During recent years consumers have become serious honeymooners and todays subject object are less marriage, more one night stand.

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Modern consumers are short distance runners, promiscuous debauchees who only stay for the getting to know period, when all is fresh, new and novel.

Write Up - The next social media frontier is the past

Key points that might influence my project •

The next big thing, some entrepreneurs believe, will leverage not “right now,” but “then.”

Here’s why: Content Gets Less Valuable Over Time. And Then It Gets More Valuable.

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Its success depends upon a funny thing that happens to the value of a memory. “It tends to drop fairly quickly,” explains Nabeel Hyatt, a Venture Partner at Spark Capital who invested in the startup. “So a month from now I might not care about that photo [I shared] at all. But then it rises back up again. A year from now, two years from now, 10 years from now…That person might have become my best friend in the world, that person may have become my lover or my wife. The history of that person becomes even more interesting as time goes on.”

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You Don’t Remember Everything. But It Would Be Helpful If You Did.

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Future applications of your social media history could be more practical. “It’s kind of what a calculator is for math, this is for your memory,” Hyatt says.

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Health isn’t the only category for which a history of daily data input can be helpful. An app called Saga tracks how you spend your time so that you can later learn to be more efficient.

Mint.com logs every swipe of your credit card to help you budget better in the future. The quantified-self movement gives people an excuse to log data in real-time just like social media gives them an excuse to create an accidental diary.

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This is the first time in history such a vivid real-time record of individual lives has existed, and we’ve only just started to explore its potential.

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http://www.fastcompany.com/3004660/why-next-social-media-frontier-past

Write Up - By 2020, World’s data expected to exceed 40 zettabytes

Key points that might influence my project •

Are you a compulsive Facebook user? Do you love using your smart phone as a camera?

Do you tweet multiple times a day, or upload funny videos of your dog or cat online?

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If you answered yes, you are part of the data capacity explosion. Why, you ask? In 2012, 68% of data was created through social media networks, mobile phone images and videos, and digital TV streamed over the Internet.

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According to a recent update from the Digital Universe study, the world’s digital data will reach 40 zettabytes by the year 2020.

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Future endeavors focusing on ‘Big Data’ will mine data to reveal patterns that could provide valuable information like consumer buying trends. The IDC estimates that, in 2020, 33% of all data worldwide could be analyzed to provide valuable information.

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http://www.reliant-technology.com/storage_blog/worlds-data-40-zettabytes

FEB February 2013

Write Up - Hyperconnectivity is changing our sense of identity

Key points that might influence my project •

Does your Facebook profile accurately represent who you are online? What about your LinkedIn profile? Or Twitter?

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Even if you don’t create your own online accounts, your families and friends may discuss you or post photographs of you online.

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Proliferation of devices and virtually unlimited storage capacity, the Internet allows people to document any aspect of their lives, creating a huge store of personal data distributed across multiple platforms that can be mined.

Write Up - Why you really do want your twitter archive

Key points that might influence my project

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Rather than making users fish tweets from the archive using an exact URL, they will be able to download a zip file that contains their Twitter history with a few clicks.

The feature is similar to Facebook’s “Download Your Info” feature or Google’s “Takeout” products.

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Users can already search Twitter history through third-party apps such as Topsy.

But, points out Cathy Marshall, a principal researcher in Microsoft’s Silicon Valley Lab who studies personal digital archiving, that doesn’t remove the risk of losing it.

“What guarantee do you have that a small company has any stability itself? You’ve backed up your tweets to another service, and you don’t know what its general outlook is.”

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Creating what looks like a simple download option becomes more difficult when scaled for 140 million users who together create 340 million new tweets every day.

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“Google’s index of the entire Internet ranges from about, in some estimates, 45 billion web pages to 125 billion web pages,” he says. “So the size of Twitter is on the order of the size of the Internet--just in tweets instead of web pages.

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De Guerre hypothetically imagines new ways to visualize history, not unlike Facebook Timeline.

•

“The data has value,” he says. “We know it has value because it’s traded on marketplaces.”

Write Up - On the Web, forever has a due date by Ivor Tossell

Key points that might influence my project •

“Facebook!” you exclaim. “I remember Facebook! I posted 250,000 pictures to Facebook.

My lost youth!”. If it sounds improbable that everything you’ve piled into Facebook might evaporate in just 10 years, then consider: One of the biggest websites of the late 1990s is about to get deleted.

•

Lately, there’s been so much discussion about the permanence of information - especially the embarrassing kind - that we have overlooked the fact that it can also disappear. At a time when we’re throwing all kinds of data and memories onto free websites, it’s a blunt reminder that the future can bring unwelcome surprises.

•

But what happens to your thousands of photos and photo captions and comments on photos, should the future prove equally unkind to Facebook?

•

Companies can promise a great many things, and I’m willing to believe most of them. But they can’t promise to be there forever. We should stop whistling on, doe-eyed, pretending like they have.

Reading - Generation Cloud

Notes & Quotes The research team at the centre for Creative and Social Technology (CAST), University of London, quite literally “lived in the cloud” for two weeks, insightfully bringing together online and offline qualitative research alongside trend analysis to elaborate just how many ways we interact and store in the cloud.

•

A social study into the impact of cloud-based services on everyday UK life

•

Key finding #1: Britain stashes £2.3bn worth of digital possessions in the cloud

•

The UK’s £2.3bn worth of digital treasures

•

The majority of UK adults (53.5 per cent) have treasured possessions stored online in cloud services. These digital treasures include special videos (such as wedding videos), photos and emails, as well as passwords and valuable documents, such as wills.

•

Almost a quarter (24 per cent) of UK adults estimate that they have digital treasures worth more than £200 per person in the cloud, which amounts to at least £2.3bn across the nation.

•

30 per cent of Brits have considered our digital possessions as potential ‘digital inheritance’

•

11 per cent either have passwords to their digital treasures in their will,or plan to do so • Almost three quarters of adults store photos on the cloud.

• 13% store more than 500 photos.

• 48% store music tracks.

• 10% store more than 500 tracks.

• 44% store financial and legal documents.

• An average social network user creates 90 pieces of content a month.

• 57% of people talk more online than in real life.

“A very real danger is that the valuable contents of private cloud accounts will simply be lost upon the owner’s death either because the accounts are not known about by others or because access is not possible without the user and password details,” said Steven Thorpe, Partner at Gardner Thorpe Solicitors.

Design Precedence

Retrospective recollection of possessions on social networks

Facebook Timeline

Time Hop

Evaluation Facebook Timeline and Time Hop help us recollect moments back in time but we cannot ethically bequeath them.

Design Precedence

Archiving possessions on social networks

Recollect

Facebook - Download your information

Google Takeout

Instaport

Evaluation I got my hands on these services to understand how they allow users to preserve their content and its authenticity. Figure 11 is my Instagram photograph with an annotation and a like. Figure 12 is the possession I received when I choose to archive it. Archived assets do not contain all the layers of memories. The soul of my possession is lost, namely the meta-data, annotations, locations tags are the cues that help us recollect the moment by showing familiarity. If we wanted to infer events from the condition of an object in the manner of detective interpreting clues, to recollect a memory, we could not. Friends tagged and comments might tell us about the context of my possession, which is lost when we want to archive and opt out of these services.

Blue Ocean Brand Space

What makes the service distinctive?

Validated

5

4

3

2

1

0

1

2

3

4

Secured

5

Loose

Open

Emotional

Monetary

Authentic

Ambiguous

Personal

Social

Ethical

Equivocal

Longevity

Transient

Next In Line

Facebook Memorial

Legacy locker

Legal Will

Time Hop

Recollect.com

The Onliness of the service

•

A platform that permits to Validate, preserve, inherit and ethically bequeath digital possessions.

•

A platform for being selective in preserving, inheriting and ethically bequeathing digital possessions in their authentic form.

System Mapping - Draft 04

Description Our digital presence consists of three different kinds of possessions,Personal, Social and Public assets and they are spread between different services.

This proposal is to enable the possessor to be selective to preserve their best moments. Digital information which is generic, will be filtered to create the aura of personal quality. The possessors are allowed to connect to their heirs and the heirs can pick an asset that they are personally related to and they will the custodians of the assets.

Design Iteration - Draft 04

NEXT IN

LINE

Name Pass Phrase

SIGN OUT

About

Contact

Walter Bruce Willis ****** **********

News

Subscription

Terms

©2013

Login page

+ Preserve

Next in line

SIGN OUT

Home page

About

Contact

Inherit it!

News

Subscription

View

Terms

©2013

Attach

Social Networks

Desktop

iTunes

SIGN OUT

About

Embed Link

Pictures

Contact

News

Documents

Subscription

Movies

Terms

©2013

Preserve possession location selection

Secured

& Preserved

Back to Twitter

SIGN OUT

About

Preserve possession confirmation interface

Contact

News

Subscription

Terms

©2013

SIGN OUT

About

Contact

News

Subscription

Terms

News

Subscription

Terms

©2013

Select possessor to inherit

Jun ’95

SIGN OUT

About

Archive of preserved and inherited assets

Contact

©2013

Different colour option

Design Iteration - Draft 4.1

Different colour versions

Service Emotional Space / Service DNA

Key values Authenticity Evocative Longevity Secured Characteristics

Brand Personality Functional

Aesthetic

Characteristics

Characteristics

Ethical

Smart

Authentic

Emotional

Trustworthy

Trustworthy

Smart

Ethical

Durability

Personal

Curated

Long-lasting

Obligatory

Obligatory

Curated

Responsible

Secured

Obligatory

Curated Durable

Self centered

Responsible

Long lasting

Evocative

Trustworthy

Trendy Personal

Project Hook

•

Digital Heirlooms

•

Digital Crumbs

•

Next In Line

•

SYPP - Secure Your Possessions

•

Preserving and bequeathing digital possessions

•

Digital information as an heirloom

Logo

NEXT LINE [ IN

]

DIGITAL INFORMATION AS AN HEIRLOOM

NEXT IN LINE DIGITAL INFORMATION AS AN HEIRLOOM

NEXT IN LINE[ ] DIGITAL INFORMATION AS AN HEIRLOOM

NEXT IN LINE Digital Inforamtion as an heirloom

NEXT IN LINE DIGITAL INFORMATION AS AN HEIRLOOM

[ ]

Logo in use

NEXT IN LINE[ ] DIGITAL

INFORMATION

AS

AN

HEIRLOOM

NEXT IN LINE Semantics - Immediately below the present holder of a position in order of succession.

[ ] ellipsis noun ( pl. ellipses |-sēz| ) the omission from speech or writing of a word or words that are superfluous or able to be understood from contextual clues.

Ellipses can also be used to indicate an unfinished thought or, at the end of a sentence, a trailing off into silence (aposiopesis, is a figure of speech where in a sentence is deliberately broken off and left unfinished, the ending to be supplied by the imagination).[1]

DIGITAL INFORMATION AS AN HEIRLOOM Tagline, is to briefly communicate about the service.

Blue Ocean Strategy - Actions Framework

System Mapping - Draft 4.2

Description ‘Next in Line’ is a digital safety box and a safe pair of hands for enabling the bequeathing of digital possessions. This web service has been developed around the Bruce Willis persona. He embraces a life of high digital technological competence through personal and social network possessions. Next In Line is a website that allows users to preserve digital possessions while adding annotations and obligations to them. The service allows the connection of a possessor with a Next In Line account for the inheritance of preserved possessions. Users can also accept heirs who view and inherit a user’s preserved possessions.

Design Iteration - Draft 4.2

Wireframe sketches to preserve a possession

Login Interface

Home Page

Preserve social possession interface

Preserve personal possession interface

Design Iteration - Draft 4.2

Getting started page

Home page

Preserving possession page

Selecting a particular possession

Annotation & Obligation page

Preserve confirmation interface

View preserved & inherited assets

Manage possessors and next in line

Select a possessor to visit their archive

Case Study - UsedSoft GmbH v Oracle International Corp

Key points that might infulence my project

Evaluation There are new services like redigi.com, which now allow the resale or transfer of access rights of used digital music and digital books. If a user can resell their digital asset, why not bequeath them? Without a service that can ethically and legally help users pass on digital assets and preserve digital possessions authentically users can only follow unethical methods, like coping documents onto flash drives to hand down.

Write Up - A market for second-hand digital possessions is about to emerge

Key points that might influence my project

Evaluation Redigi.com ethically allow resale access rights of used digital music and digital books. If a user can resell their digital asset, why not bequeath them?

Write Up - Second-hand Angry Birds? EU lets software be resold

Key points that might influence my project

Facebook - Terms of service

Key points that might influence my project

i Tunes & Kindle Terms of sale

Kindle terms

i Tunes terms Tunes now provides i Tunes Plus, a service that allow users to upgrade their ‘licensed to use’ I Tunes possessions into owned assets that can be copied and stored as necessary for personal, non-commercial use (i Tunes Store, 2012).

Evaluation No service provides suggestions or terms of use in relation to bequeathing a possession or a service that enables ethical bequeathing even if the legal rights now allow a transfer of digital assets. Without a service that can ethically and legally help users pass on digital assets and preserve digital possessions authentically users can only follow unethical methods, like coping documents onto flash drives to hand down.

Reading - Digital Legacy by Thomas Eggar LLP

Key points that might influence my project •

Organising one’s personal affairs in the event of death is a morbid concept for younger individuals. However, as online activity and the average age of users increase, its not just logical, but will become vital to do so in order to protect, preserve and potentially pass on our digital legacy to loved ones.

•

the most published case to date involves yahoo!’s approach, following the death of US soldier in Fallujah, Iraq in November 2004. When Lance Cpl Justin Ellsworth was killed, his father decided to create a memorial to his son using the emails he has written and received whilst in the middle east. However, Yahoo! adhering to their terms of service, refused to give Lance Cpl Ellsworth’s family his password or access to his correspondence on the basis of privacy.

•

In many cases individuals many only find that, by providing passwords, they have breached the terms of their licensing agreements with the ISP and could have their accounts closed and all contents deleted.

•

“When you have a real tangible sword or gold coin, you have an exclusive right to that object and the law can recognise that, but when you have the mediation of network software and the owner of the virtual environment, they have an interest as well. They are caught in the middle.

•

in the real world post office doesn’t send some one to burn your correspondence after you death. The land registry doesn’t send a crew to tear down your home, but online (under the current agreements) this can on effect be the default position.

•

Innovation and assets created are continually evolving and the history shows us the danger of reacting too slowly to change.1894 saw the first privately owned motor car driven in the UK. However it was until 1903, as a result of increasing death due to excessive speed and vehicle safety, that compulsory registration and the drivers license was introduced.

Similarly, the first credit card was issued by Dinners Club in 1950, with the first bank credit card following 1958. As a result of increasing need to protect consumers from unscrupulous lenders, it took until 1974 for the first UK consumer credit legislation to be passed.

MAR March 2013

User Testing

Methodology introduction Value opportunity analysis , The method used to evaluate the service is a value opportunity analysis that maps the extent to which the product’s aspirational qualities align with people’s idealised lifestyle or fantasy version of themselves (Cagan & Vogel, 2002).

Description A partially functional prototype and an illustration of key user journeys using fictional scenarios about Mr Bruce Willis and his family has been included in the service to communicate this idea.

User testing of the website and mobile app was conducted with 3 people who formed part of this project’s ethnographic research because they already knew the context of the project and 2 new participants who matched the persona of embracing a life of high or medium digital technologies competency with personal, monetary and social network possessions.

An email with an attachment of proposed prototype and basic user journey map (as shown in the next page) was sent to five people. This step was taken, as an online service should be self explanatory and should require minimum help. They were asked to use the service to preserve and inherit possessions. Users where also asked to rate their experiences for each value of the service on a scale of one to five, one being the lowest value and five being the highest, on value opportunity analysis form hosted on Google Drive. (https://docs.google.com/ forms/d/1m1gk06dNOSWaxVk98N_0f-ThOnKaEOSdEn7AjxX0A4w/view form)

NEXT IN LINE[ ] Preserve, Inherit & Bequeath digital assets

+ Sign up

Preserve

Connect with possessors

Inherit

Basic user journey map sent to user testing participants

View

4

5

5

5

5

4/8/2013 20:07:05

4/14/2013 20:24: 56

4/16/2013 21:27: 04

4/18/2013 18:58: 40

Selective

3/31/2013 19:19: 07

Timestamp

Responsible

5

5

4

4

4

Ethical

4

5

4

5

4

Secured

4

3

5

5

3

trustworthy

5

5

5

4

3

validated

5

5

4

4

2

Authentic

5

5

4

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3

Reliable

4 Andrew Gorodn I would like to have an option to see all preserved contents by my father, even if i am not allowed 3 to have them.

A link that allows the user to buy a similar asset on the web might be a better way to possess rather than downloading from ancestors 4 archive.

It wasnt a reliable experience because of the unfamiliarity in the 3 story

4 HuangYingShang

Frenny 5 Dharmecha

4 Girish Boggaram

Name

4 John Villar

Obligate

Please feel free to add any other comments that would help improve the experience Needs further imporvements on the links and authentication, this is only a model format. i also would like to carry my assets every 3 where i go.

Reliability was moderate because It had content which i am not related to, but i understand it was just to get the idea across.Otherwise it is a website i would like to 3 subscribe.

Value Opportunity Analysis - Report

Evaluation An explanation of the context and scenario was necessary for 2 new participants. This showed a necessity for a video on getting started page to communicate the scenario and context of use of the service before signing up to the service.

Dr Girish R. Boggaram was the first to test the prototype. He raised a key question of how to trust another service on the Internet that might disappear some day with all his emotional assets: ‘I would like to carry and keep my assets under my control.’ This gave rise to the mobile app.

Other user experiences through the service, namely being selective, responsible, ethical, secured, trustworthy, validated and authentic in handling users’ digital possessions, were rated four on average.

However, reliability was rated three because the users could not find reliability in the service when viewing preserved possessions on the prototype. The possessions and cues generated by the prototype were built on an illustrated scenario and the users did not have familiarity and personal connections with those possessions.

This was the aim of the proposed service, the user’s familiarity and emotional presence embodies value here; the service cannot create emotional presence, rather it is a platform that generates circumstances that would guide users towards that experience.

Time Scroll - A Next In Line mobile app

Description The question and fear of ‘what if this is another service that might cease to exist?’ was brought up during user testing. To address this the service also provides a mobile application for users who would like to keep their possessions under their control. The app synchronizes all the preserved possessions in a users mobile device and can be accessed in offline mode. This will direct the total control of user possessions to the user himself. The app is only for an already preserved and inherited possession. Users have to access a web service to preserve or inherit a possession, as this is not a decision that needs to be taken on the go.

Time scroll

Facebook unveils a radically redesigned news feed

Key points that might influence my project “The news feed is one of the most important things we’ve built,” Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the press event. Likening news feed to “the most personalized newspaper,” Zuckerberg added that “the stories around you deserve to be displayed with more than just text.”

“How we’re all sharing is changing and the news feed needs to evolve with those changes. This is the evolving face of news feed.”

The new news feed features three major components: •

Bigger Images

•

Multiple Feeds

•

Mobile Consistency

Mark Zuckerberg at his new news feed launch event

Evaluation How does the instability of the format influence its ability to preserve an emotional memory?

RIP: Google Reader meets its inevitable end

A pop up on my google reader profile

Description Wired states, Google announced that it’s killing off Google Reader effective July 1, 2013.

Reader is Google’s web-based program that let people subscribe to news feeds from their favorite sites. That’s a shame, because Reader was pretty great.

This news came as a shock to lot of people including me who were attached to the product.

Below are a few comments to show how attached are people to this service, as shown on Wired .com.

Evaluation This may be the situation with many services that we embrace today. I am positive that many people had invested time into building their profile and acquiring memories on Myspace.com, similar to the way we use Facebook today, which took away countless Myspace users. These are just trendy services that we take for granted as lasting for a long period of time. I would expect new and trendier services to come in and take me away from the ones I am using today.

APR April 2013

Google launches inactive manager

•

The launch of an “Inactive Account Manager” makes Google the first major company to let users choose of what should happen to their digital life after they die.

•

Email, blog posts, Google+ data, contacts, documents, photos and YouTube videos can all be either sent to one or more loved ones or deleted entirely if your account becomes inactive for a length of time.

Evaluation Why would anyone want to hand down all their emails or entire social network content to one family member? Imagine our grandparents leaving their entire belongings to their children.

Personally, it would not mean anything to me. They would have had something that the children should not see or know about. What if the users want to be selective about what they hand down? How might a user hand down a possession before dying or opting out of the service, like an heirloom? What if a user wants to share his possessions among his children or grandchildren?

MA Industrial Design Unit 2 Project Plan

name

Rahul Boggaram date

29/04/2013 title

Digital information as an heirlooms aim

How can we enable users to be selective to preserve, inherit and ethically bequeath digital possessions in their authentic form?

How can we unpack those experiences to offer stimuli and create a meaningful recall in to inherited digital content? research question

How can digital information be ethically passed to future generations that they value? intended audience

The project is designed for the person who would want to be selective of what they preserve and bequeath out of their digital assets. A person who feels responsible to take care of their heirlooms and thinks it’s essential to preserve their best moments and choices to convey to future generations. It is for a person who looks at digital possessions as sculptures or possessions of emotional presence. It is for Bruce Willis, who was rumoured that he wanted to equally hand down his massive library of digital music collection to his three daughters. key areas of investigation

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

Case studies of heirlooms and their custodians My Heirloom Differences between My heirloom and an heirloom Values in an Heirloom Digital Identity Personal possessions and obsolete formats.

Possessions on social networks and their ephemeral characteristics 8. Monetarily possessions and Restrictions in Digital Rights Management (DRM) to ethically bequeath.

9. Failure in policies to keep up to trends 10. Emotional durability 11. Service design

role of the project in your personal development?

One of the main reasons of this project was to question the existing digital policies and to understand how can a designer can circumvent the failure in existing policies to keep up with the necessities and behaviours of people and by choreographing solutions to problems that might not necessarily exist in main stream today, by explaining future requirements. (ERLHOFF & MARSHALL 2008).

Considering that I am exploring a question that all the mainstream digital service providers are facing and seeing that I am only looking into existing practices to draw inspirations, the proposed response might be a possible solution that can be put to use, as people can relate with the practices of heirlooms. And the legal policies have also worked in favour of the project to become a service solution than a speculative project, opening up an opportunity to start a business in a niche market.

rationale

This project started when an unexpected gift came to my door, which I photographed every step on to my social network page while I unpacked it, to understand that it was from my parents who never used Internet before, learnt it just to order a gift for their son abroad. It was truly a memorable moment, a moment I wanted to preserve and convey the emotions I went through to my future generations. What grasped my attention was that the photograph did not attract any comments or likes on my social network page. It did not interest any of my friends. This also pushed me to understand, something that was immensely meaningful to me was not at all of an interest to my friends.

Increasingly, Mobile, Social networks, Internet and other digital technologies have become part of everyday living. We are acquiring what we do, where we are, who we are with, what we like etc., in digital form around different services. This data is large rich collection of a person’s behaviour (traits) and their memories, but like a lot of us, I was surprised to know that most digital assets cannot be handed down or outlived, as our accounts restrict to an username and a password, which is not legal or ethical to share.

With the knowledge of witnessing tangible heirlooms, the similar approach to digital life might create longevity to digital possessions, evocate memories, convey stories, create a sense of burden and outlive a person.

Objectives and 1. Mapping the project and their related topics to understand the bigger methods

picture of my research question.

2. To explore the universal characteristics of an heirloom in different culture and to understand how and what was passed to next generations?

Ethnography is an obvious method to interview custodians from different cultures and backgrounds and to know the characteristics of objects that are bequest.

3. Mapping ethnographic data to understand the universal values and qualities of an heirloom.

4. Mapping ethnographic data to develop an ethnographic fictional scenario to understand how we acquire memories in the current world 5. To investigate what memories do we possess today and how do we acquire them?

Research & News Journals, Personal reflection and Questionnaires 6. Study existing methods of bequeathing and preserving digital assets.

Design Precedence, Market Research and a personal meeting with a lawyer who handles bequeathing assets.

7. Investigate existing DRM rights?

Analysing the existing DRM rights of predominant companies that handle users digital information.

8. Paper Prototyping a service design response for Work in progress show to get the audience comments.

9. User testing the design response with the interviewers who where part of ethnography.

10. Design Experimentation.

11. Customer Base, Notions, Trends, Purpose, User Persona to strengthen the design response by understanding the user better.

12. Eliminate, Raise, Reduce and Create of Blue ocean strategy was put in action to develop the values for the service design response.

13. Extensive testing with relevant user who were defined from the user persona. This was mostly the users and their families who were part of ethnographic research.

14. Value Opportunity Analysis, a method used to ask users to rate their experience on the value of the service while using the proposed output.

This shows the opportunities where the experiences of a user can be improved.

role of submissions

Project proposal – Project planning document with the proposed steps to achieve the set aim.

Design element – Service design response includes a website and a mobile app.

Written Element – A structured reasoning and justification of the project includes identifying an opportunity, analysing existing case studies and textual articles, examining the strengths and weakness of existing solutions. Underpinning design response by using relevant research techniques, methods and user testing.

Critical Journal – A chronological documentation of research, analysis, experimentation, design proposals and user testing.

CERN puts the world’s first website back online

CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research, where the World Wide Web was born), celebrating the 20th anniversary of the web being made free to the public, restored the world’s first website , putting it back online at its original URL.(http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/ TheProject.html)

The overall aim of the project hosted at info.CERN.ch by CERN is to preserve all the digital assets associated with the inception of the web, with a searchable archive for those using the Internet in years to come who will not remember a time without it.

Evaluation This is one of the fewest times in the history, web is valued for Presence(Maximal meaning, Minimal function) , rather than use (Maximal function, Minimal meaning).

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