Exploring digital photos in and across time with Chronoscope

Team

Timeframe

2018 ↝ 2023

Keywords

  • Digital Archives
  • Field Study
  • Domestic Technology
  • Interaction Design
  • Metadata
  • Research Through Design
  • Research Product
  • Slow Technology

Outcome

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    Novel Temporal Interaction Design
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    Four deployed Chronoscope research products
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    Three month field study with four households
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    Book Chapter, Journal Article and Papers at ACM CHI & DIS

The Core Idea

Chronoscope offers a unique journeys through your digital photo archive in and across time. With a tangible interface centered on rotational interactions, Chronoscope opens up explorations of the many experiences, memories, and associations one’s massive digital photo archive in ways that change with you over time.

Chronoscope’s algorithm is designed to encourage curiosity and exploration by using different forms of time to orient through one’s massive digital photo archive.

Design Process

How will personal digital photo archives be valuably experienced as they grow to a size and scale never experienced before in human history? People love to take digital photos to document many kinds of experiences and histories in their lives. Yet, photo archive are massive, fragmented, and, often, largely invisible. People rarely go back to revisit them. With a tangible interface centered around rotational interactions, Chronoscope opens up explorations of the many experiences, memories, and associations one’s massive digital photo archive in ways that change with you over time.

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Design iterations of Chronoscope with custom electronics embedded in a scope-like form.

We created a custom control board that integrates a Raspberry PI Zero W with a 240×240 color display, a rotary encoder attached to a rotating wheel, a rotary switch for changing the timeframe made, and a potentiometer for ‘tuning’ how fast or slow the user can move through time. A lithium ion cylindrical battery powers Chronoscope for portability.

Chronoscope’s physical enclosure is fabricated from 3D printed resin to create a strong structural integrity and to evoke a weighty, steady feeling when hand-held. We also hand made silicone covers for the eye piece and the main viewing direction’s rotational mechanism to provide a softer, inviting texture when in use.

Our process was highly inspired by scope-like forms which not only suggest rotation-based tangible interaction but also invite users to view and contemplate the viewed phenomena in an intentional, inquisitive way. The near-eye viewer quality of this form is notably personal and support our goal of design for experiences of individual reflection on one’s past.

Interaction Design

Chronoscope is a near eye interactive photo viewer that enables users to revisit, navigate, explore, and contemplate the various memories bound up in their personal photo archives across time. A cornerstone of the Chronoscope interaction design is its three interconnected timeframe modes that enables the user to interact with their digital photos through chronological (Linear) and non-chronological (Date, Time) forms of time.

When a new mode is selected, the center photo-in-view does not change, while the surrounding photos are replaced with ones from the new timeframe. This enables the photo-in-view to operate as a kind of anchor point that creates interconnections across different timeframe modes. Chronoscope offers direct control to the user to change the timeframe modes and the position ‘in time’ within their photo archive whenever desired.

Explore Chronoscope

Timeframe Modes

Users can toggle among 3 different temporal modalities: Time, Date, Linear. This enables the viewable image to act as an ‘anchor point’ through time and, in effect, empowers the user to explore a wide range of temporal interconnections between different photographs taken at different points in the user’s past

Temporal Granularity

Because photo archives can be very large, the user needed to be able to move through their photo archive in slow and considered ways and to move across vast amounts of photos without an excessive amount of rotations. This knob adds control over the number of photos moved across in each degree of rotation. Tuning the granularity creates freedom to move through photos from minutes in a day to years of one’s life, making it easy to slow down or speed up

Rotation Wheel

Rotation wheel to move forward or backward in time.

Eyepiece

Gaze into the eyepiece to see photos from your past stitched together through different forms of time.

Field Study of Chronoscope

Study Goals

We aimed to ① Investigate the reflective potentialities of personal data for memory-oriented photo view and exploration as well as ② empirically explore conceptual propositions related to slow technology.

Research Process

We hand crafted a small batch of 4 Chronoscope research products and put them 4 separate households for 3 months. Each Chronoscope Radio contained personal digital photo archives that spanned at least a decade.

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All four Chronoscopes were sent out to people’s homes and led to new ways of understanding their photo archives.

Participant Stories

  • “Chronoscope really comes in to help me to be in reflective mindset, so I really appreciate it. It’s become part of my habits now. At the beginning, I didn’t really understand what it means to have Date and Time modes just because I think we’re not used to seeing photos that way. They helped me to learn different ways of relating to my photos, and just think outside the box.” ”
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    Bell on how interactions with Chronoscope shaped how she related to her photo archive.

  • “I like how I can find a thing, a time in my life, and slowly look in at it. But I can also move fast and compare experiences, you know, move back and forth quickly over 10 years. I can see a huge part of my history in a short time.” ”
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    Clara describes the value of moving between the slowest and fastest interaction pacing with the granularity knob, noting the kinds of memories that surfaced.

  • “When I was going through the Linear mode, I actually feel the journey of my life. I’m reminded that there’s a big picture there. I feel all kinds of emotions. I feel really grateful and very fortunate to be able to experience all the things that I have experienced, but also being able to experience that again, when I was going forward in time with Chronoscope.” ”
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    Bell on the ‘journey-like’ interaction prompting her to develop a narrative for interpreting the life experiences she navigated in her photos.

  • “If I give my photo archive to the next generation, I wouldn’t just throw in everything and give it to them. I know if I’m handing down my Chronoscope, the timeframe modes are something that’s connecting me and my photos in a way that a person can understand.” ”
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    Porter reflects on how the temporal qualities of Chronoscope created context for loved ones to make sense of and engage with his photo archive.

  • “When I’m getting older like 50 or 60, I would want to go check my youth time more, like what I’ve done before. It will be more meaningful. I think it Chronoscope might work well for people over a certain age, like in their elderly life. I think they will be super happy." ”
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    Alice contemplated the longer-term viability of her photo archive as a resource for reminiscing on the trajectory of her life history when she is older.

Outcomes & Implications

The Chronoscope project provide new insights into how leveraging different interconnected forms of time as a cornerstone of the design can offer unique ways of interacting with digital photo archives in ways that overcame limitations commonly experiences with contemporary photo viewing applications that inhibit remembering experiences. This project also illustrates how physical form, digital photos, and interaction can come together in a design artifact to evoke a quality of co-evolving change over time. This research also contributes another step toward understanding how the concept of slow technology can be extended and advanced in design practice and field research.

Related Publications ↘
chapter in The Routledge International Handbook of Practice-Based Research 2021

Crafting Temporality in Design: Introducing a designer-researcher approach through the creation of Chronoscope

Acknowledgments

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    The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI).

Next Project

Check out Memory Tracer →