Overview and objectives

The course will be very collaborative and highly interdisciplinary. Students from all over the CMU campus will be involved. So, it’s important we get to know each other, as well as the backgrounds, goals, the skills and interests each of us have. This project will challenge you to:

• Clearly communicate your skills and interests to other participants of the course;
• Develop an understanding the skills and abilities of potential collaborators in the course and how they compliment your skills.
• Develop an understanding of the range of disciplines and interests in the class, as well as how they contribute to exploring technology mediated memory!

The goal of this exercise will be introduce yourself to the other students in the course with a quickly assembled collage

Context and Background

This exercise is based on a study I performed and published back in 2011 (Byrne, Kelliher, and Jones. 2011. Life editing: third-party perspectives on lifelog content. In Proc CHI ‘11)

In this paper, we asked 15 students from the media editing course to edit my life and create stories about me. They didn’t know me but were given the following prompt:

“You will be “The Cutter” of someone’s life experience. Using the data collected by an individual over a 9-month period, you will create an album(s) demonstrating insight into this person’s life. Who are they, what have they done, how can we interpret their everyday encounters, how might they be remembered?”

They had access to a digital tool and an detailed digital archive of thousands of my everyday experiences. And they explored a lot!

Brief:

Using the conceit of our life editing paper, now edit your life into a short collage that introduces you through your own digital legacy to the class

Produce a collage, composition or short video (no more than 2 minutes) that:

1. Uses 5-10 (max) items of content from your own digital life (photos, tweets, texts, GPS traces, FitBit screens, etc.)

2. Briefly introduces you to the rest of the class, your background, your skills, etc., etc.;

You can include a 100-150 word statement that narrates or explains your composition and/or explores your hopes, desires or fears for the future of technology mediated memory?

Submitting your work:

Post the image/video to the #introductions channel on slack.

Say Hi to your Peers!

Constraint

You can’t create media specifically for this project. You must reuse existing digital content that you’ve previously posted, produced or collected about yourself.

Considerations

When preparing your composition, below are some questions you might think about:

1. Who are you and what’s your background? How might this be different or similar to others in the class? What digital content might embody or represent that to the class?

2. What’s an example of something you’ve made/analyzed/explored that relates to this class?

3. What are your unique skills that will help you prototyping digital memories: smart objects, intelligent spaces or mobile tools that could help support digital memory?

4. What are the images/ideas/concepts about memory that you love? What are the memories that you cherish and what content do you have about them?

5. What content have you collected that you’ve forgotten about? Why should (or shouldn’t) we remember everything?

6. Would you record your entire life if given the chance?