Exploring misalignments between how digital file archives and our minds work

Project and article by A. Arnau Donate

With the democratization of computers, the use of an analogy to the physical world such as the file-folder system was a great way to communicate and soften the learning curve of the masses. However, fast forward sixty years more and you realize that the way we organize information inside computers has barely changed. The way we navigate them is very counterintuitive, relying strongly on memory to retrieve them. The fundamental issue is a clash between how our mental models work and how archiving and file organization systems require our brains to process information.

I designed a scanning intervention to test with a small group of participants how we actually process the information we see on the screen.

The intervention was divided in two steps. I created a set of files, and asked each participant to perform very simple tasks in them, exposing participants to the information, context and content of each file, trying to keep their minds busy to avoid memorization. In the second part, I asked each participant to retrieve anything they could remember from each document.

The scanning was very useful, proving some assumptions but also offering some unexpected insights:

• Participants remembered with a very high level of accuracy the parts of the document they were asked to edit.
• Colours were a recurring element they would very clearly remember.
• Only in one case one of the participants remembered the name of one of the files they worked on.
• They had a tendency to remember funny, out of place or remarkable bits of information.

The second stage for this scanning will be to have another session with the same participants in a month, and ask them about the files they saw previously, so I can better understand which bits of information are kept through time and which aren’t.