Preserving Experiences, Not Just Memories
If your family is like mine, you are part of at least five photo sharing threads on your phone. You have one picture sharing thread for each niece, nephew, and cousin. I am grateful that I get to share in my family’s lives this way because we are all spread throughout the country. Every day I can look forward to a video of the new song my niece may have learned or a photo of my nephew trying a new food. I even get to be part of a photo stream for my cousins’ new puppy. There are enough photos to fill stacks of albums, yet I have them all here on my phone. I rarely get a chance to look at them all, so I’ll see the ones I can, and pay special attention to the ones that others call out. There are so many great things about this method of sharing precious moments that couldn’t have existed before. This method of sharing photos has come to replace making physical albums, printing pictures, and archiving memories in a curated way but it also allows for us to share our lives with each other across great distances.
When we get notified of these pictures we’re often not together, and our communication about them is through comment or text message. We’ve created an endless repository of memories to access whenever we want, but I get the feeling we’ve lost something important in making this transition.
I recently began feeling this way when my wife and I spent some time at her parents’ house to visit. My wife came over to me with three huge photo albums of her and her siblings from when they were young. As we were flipping through the albums I felt enthralled by the pages of photos, with descriptions written in pencil marking events they captured on small pieces of paper. We sat together on the floor, flipping from page to page as my wife and my mother-in-law reminisced about each event that was archived. We were looking at pictures, just as we might on a photo stream, but the feeling was vastly different. It was as if I was experiencing these events with them. Their facial expressions, emotions, and stories were intoxicating.
Having thought about user experience so much this year it saddens me that this experience is potentially being lost. I don’t believe it’s the only experience like this either. People like my mother might tell you the feeling they get when reading from an ebook just isn’t the same as holding and reading a physical book, yet book stores are failing left and right.
While I don’t know the solution yet, I can’t help but feel as innovation continues exponentially, experiences like these are being left behind. Does there have to be a trade off between innovating and preserving the experience? Innovation can change the way we experience something as simple as looking at a photo. As designers, it is our obligation to work on preserving the things that make these experiences special.
