DP0 - Bridging the Digital-Physical Divide

Our first design project for ME313, Human Values & Innovation in Design, was a short two-day project on the divide between the digital and physical worlds, especially as it related to digital assets and memories.

Problem Statement:
The digital age has brought many affordances such as digital imaging and easy video recording, but their ease of use has not been without a cost. The success of digital technologies has created a deep gulf between physical experiences and digital ones, and experiences such as passing a photograph around has almost vanished entirely. Even though we have evolved as creatures who have an intimate relationship with the physical world, our digital experiences underutilize our intuitive understanding of physical spaces and manipulating physical objects.

The ease and low cost associated with photography causes a flood of images, a huge back-end task that is difficult to get around to. One's memories get buried among hundreds of folders.

Design Challenge:
Create a novel experience in the physical world to deal with one's memories and digital assets. Express your concept in any medium that you are comfortable with.

Solution:
I began by outlining the problem I wanted to address: digital photography has made it so easy to take, edit, and store photos, I end up with thousands of pictures in countless folders on my computer that begin to lose their relevance and significance in my life. After being filed away in deeply nested folders, I rarely revisit these pictures, perhaps when I occasionally clean out my hard drive or if I accidentally open a wrong folder.

Those occasions when I do browse through my old photos are wonderful. I enjoy the element of surprise and unexpectedness at stumbling upon these memories and reminiscing. Unfortunately, this is a rare occurrence.

With this in mind, I raised the question, "Can I recreate this experience of surprise and delight on a more regular basis?"

Creating a mind map of where digital photos lack a clear connection to the physical world, I sought to identify potential ideas to combine with my surprise element. However, I found that for the most part, there were good analogies equating digital photography with analog photography. For example, both can be dated, captioned, stored in albums, and easily shared with friends.

So instead, I looked for a connection between the digital and physical worlds of photography. Here, I stumbled upon one of the few aspects that truly bridges the divide geotagging, an increasingly popular concept that tags digital photos with GPS coordinates. Although the idea is not so new, it is only within the last year or two that cameras are being manufactured with an internal GPS unit that enables automatic geotagging.

Combining my two insights, I developed my solution: an application for an IPhone, laptop, or other portable media device that compares your current location with the GPS coordinates on the photos in your device's library. When the application finds a match, the photo automatically pops up on the screen, creating surprise and unexpectedness, along with reminiscing and recalling old memories.

The device would need only an internal GPS chip, which is becoming common in portable media devices, and a library of uploaded photos. The application would simply be a program running in the background of the device that awakened when a photo match was found.

I thought this concept would be especially meaningful for frequent business travelers who spend enough time on the road and in airports that it becomes easy to forget where one has previously visited.

Given the extremely short timeframe and broad scope of the project, I felt very proud of my concept. I was able to create a novel, yet feasible solution to the defined problem, and present it using a clear and compelling story.

Here's a step-by-step example of my concept in action:

Step 1: Visit some destination on vacation (e.g. Chicago)