Keywords

1 Introduction

Before the birth of human beings, there was no artifacts exist in the world. The appearance of artifacts comes along with the emergence of human beings. Moreover, the development of material civilization has a synchronized pace with the human civilization. As an intellectual creature, the human continue to improve their skills of creating and crafting, thus the man-made objects become the record of the development of human capacity of creating. Before the Industrial Revolution, the development of human creation was at an early stage with a steady slow growth, most of the making demands were driven by survival needs, the emotional relationships between human and objects were long-lasting and simple.

The Industrial Revolution dramatically increased the availability of consumer goods, the manufacturing demands were not only from survival, but also from capital and spiritual needs. The advent of the department store represented a paradigm shift in the experience of shopping. For the first time, customers could buy an astonishing variety of goods, all in one place, and shopping became a popular leisure activity. While previously the norm had been the scarcity of resources, the Industrial era created an unprecedented economic situation. For the first time in history products were available in outstanding quantities, at outstandingly low prices. And the newly emerged e-commerce makes products available to virtually everyone. Various personal items have different function and characteristics, recording its owner’s stories, experiences and memories; hence they gradually formed emotional connection with their owner. However, this human—object relationship allows people to scatter emotions and memories on different belongings, thus belongings lost or obsoleted would bring people the loss of emotion and memory.

Museum is institution that cares for a collection of artifacts and other objects of scientific, artistic, cultural, or historical importance and makes them available for public viewing through exhibits that may be permanent or temporary. Throughout the history of museum, the museum development is closely tied with the human civilization. Before the Industrial Revolution, the human’s awareness of museum was in its infancy, while there were only a few museums with several types all over the world. After the Industrial Revolution, the museum amount and types increase rapidly, but most of the museums are traditional public museums, only a small number of museums are specific on keeping ordinary people’s personal history.

The vigorous development of the Internet has promoted popular culture onto a new stage. Public awareness of self-expression and civic participation has been improved. Internet allows ordinary people to generate their own contents and spread it all over the world. By sharing and social interaction, people influence each other, gaining encouragement and inspiration. The use of mobile Internet gives an additional boost to the use of Social Media, making information sharing and spreading faster and more convenient. In KPCB analyst Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends report states that all internet-connected citizens share over 1.8 billion photos each day in 2014 [1].

The rest of the paper is organized as follows: the next section we list other related works. The third section summarizes our user research of active users who share their belongings regularly. Following that, we present the two other contributions of this paper. The first is Wu Personal Museum, a novel form of virtual museum for recording and displaying personal belongings and the related stories that was designed based on findings from the qualitative user research. The second contribution is a MVP (Minimum Viable Product) test of this design and the lessons we learned. The user study demonstrates that Wù Personal Museum supports users to record their belongings, enables users to display their memory and emotion linking to the belongings, and encourages users to get emotional consolation and resonance from their records and social interaction.

2 Related Works

2.1 Online Virtual Museum

Online virtual museum is a digital entity that draws on the characteristics of a museum, in order to complement, enhance, or augment the museum experience through personalization, interactivity and richness of content. Most physical museums now have an online presence. These online museums provide simple background information, a list of exhibitions, and the photo of the collections in their exist museums with multimedia, searchable or browsable features. It is a simple mirror of physical museums.

2.2 Nice

Nice is an app that told story of the picture. It allows people to see into the lives of people all over the world. Snap a picture from any moment of life and add a sticker to personalize photo. Use photo tagging feature to tell a story within picture. The picture people snap or tag can related everything, such as people’s favorite brands, places, and activities! So the needs of users is very different from each other, and the pictures shows to us is very different. It focus on tag, and tag is more useful to displayed the brands, people’s name, place, but not suitable to tell story. The purpose of Nice is more about content consumption, rather than a precipitate emotion, what we think is very important to people, and hope to people to obtain more.

3 Methodology

We were interested to explore the attitudes of people towards various ways of keeping and sharing their belongings, which could be valuable reference and inspiration for our personal museum. To better understand this new form of personal museum, we conducted a series of design research including (1) desktop research and social network immersion to gather basic information and real user sharing (2) a questionnaire study involving 80 active users to share their views and behaviors about keeping belongings; and (3) follow-up semi-structured in-depth interviews with 9 representative users to further study the emotional relationship behind their private belongings and personal story.

We investigated more than 30 online forums and mobile Apps and then chose 2 social networks to conduct our user observation: the Douban and the Weibo. Douban is a Chinese social networking service that offers “lifestyle and culture” products and services for urbanites and college students. Weibo is a Chinese microblogging website. Akin to a hybrid of Twitter and Facebook, it is one of the most popular sites in China, in use by well over 30 % of Internet users, with a market penetration similar to the United States’ Twitter. In Douban, the user group Fetishism had 12716 group members with approximately 2000 posts. While in Weibo, the hashtag Do Not Want To Throw Away Old Belongings had 3.2 billion reads, 13 thousands discussions and 1400 fans. People shared their personal belongings and commented with each other actively in these 2 topic groups. We immersed into these 2 topic groups and interacted with users.

The first author registered on Douban and Weibo and started by posting her own belonging stories under the topic groups. Her post got active responses from the members, thus triggered social interactions, both within and out of the post. She also posted a recruitment message under the topic groups, which disclosed our intention of conducting user research about personal museum, as well as her WeChat information for further contact. Based on the impressions gained from observations and social interactions in the groups, we got basic findings of people disposing belongings as well as actively reached out for more members who appeared active and interesting for questionnaires and interviews. Among these members, we conducted 80 questionnaires and from which we picked out 9 members as our in-depth interviews.

The aim of questionnaire was not to get a quantitative data but to better understand the qualitative basic information of users and their relationship between their belongings. In the questionnaire, we collected the primary information about the people’s attitudes towards old belongings, belongings disposing methods and willingness of sharing story behind their belongings. In addition, we were filtering out the proper in-depth interviewees. Details about our in-depth interview participants are shown in Table 1. In in-depth interview, we asked about the details of how they had first started capturing their belongings, sharing the story about this item, how specifically they interacted with the people who interested and left comments with their sharing. When some valuable view points came up, we followed up for further details and concrete examples. Interviews were conducted via WeChat App which is available for live video and audio chat and photo transferring. All interviews were conducted in Mandarin, audio or text recorded, and were later transcribed into Chinese.

Table 1. In-depth interview participants’ information
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4 Findings

Our research participants represent a small percentage of the population in China. Nonetheless, for this particular user group, recording and sharing their emotional memories with belongings has become their very important regulation. Thus these users can be targeted ass the typical user for us to research and gain findings for our further design.

4.1 Personal Belongings as a Record of Life Trajectory

Emotional memory has strong relation with physical memory. In our research, the people who moved out of their hometowns take childhood belongings as the token of remembering the hometown and old times. In addition, when experiencing their lives’ “big moment”, they usually kept an object as the monuments, such as a trophy, a wedding photo or the first fallen teeth. Therefore, those important monuments composed their lives’ trajectory or atlas.

4.2 Belonging-Related Record Behaviour Is Triggered by Emotion

People interact with lots of goods everyday, only a few are important enough to be recorded or documented, so as the memorable people and experience. Moreover, to record these things are trivial and hard to remember. Most of the participants told us, the very moment they came up with recording important things was touched by something when doing housekeeping or at the emotional climax. We argue that the recording behaviour is triggered by emotion and we need to lower the threshold of enabling user to record the moment.

4.3 People Share Belongings to Seek Emotional Consolation and Resonance

Once wrote a story about their belongings, the people are aim at writing down the details of the feeling or the story. They wanted to keep the emotional memories. Some of them just wanted to keep the memories in their deeper heart, but if anyone who wanted to share the story, they were seeking to make the story listened by others. Moreover, if there were feedback from the audience, they would feel happier and accepted by others.

5 The Design of Personal Museum

Our design research helped us define a set of user-driven design goals for a personal museum to record human-object emotion. These goals include: (1) be easy and friendly to use, facilitating item and emotion recording, collecting and sharing, (2) focusing on user-generated content with proper management view, (3) encouraging item-based social interaction to enhance emotional resonance. Based on existing research of online virtual public museum and picture-based interests social network, to provide a better user experience, we decided to utilize mobile device in our design. We thereby created Wù Personal Museum, a mobile phone app supports users to record their belongings with least effort and more useful information, display their memory and emotion linking to the belonging, and get emotional consolation and resonance from their records and social interaction.

5.1 Record the Owner-Belonging’s Emotion Information and Relationship

Wù Personal Museum supports user to record emotional information of belongings, simplifies user process of recording information. When taking a photo, users can give tags and description, choose different types of filters to beautify the photo and better express the emotions related to the item. Meanwhile, users can set specific time and location of the item as the start point of the item’s virtual life tree, after that, they can keep logging the item’s latest status to expand its lifeline. With image recognition technique, key features of the item would be extracted to help the system make recommendation. While other users log the same or similar item, they will be shown up in the item page. By correlating the relevant people who own the same or similar item, more stories and emotion would be expressed and shared. When the item is added into a museum, people can give their like and comments to this item. In such organization form, the item is no longer a stand-alone object, but strongly linked to its product family, owner groups and specific time with the string of emotional proximity (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1.
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Belongings emotional information

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5.2 Varied Museum to Present Personal Style

Wù Personal Museum provides 2 layouts for user to manage and view their belonging collection. In timeline layout, the items are displayed in chronological order. By swiping upward and downward, the user can review his or her life trajectory by the items. For instance, once the user adds his or her textbooks into Wù Personal Museum, a museum named “My Student Life” would be set up to display the user’s primary school, middle school and high school. In Sudoku (3 × 3 grid) layout, users can show their style and taste directly along with the items’ appearance and emotional tones (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2.
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Diversification museum

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This is a better for managing items under different themes, such as doll museum, love museum and family museum. Moreover, the users can pick out their favorite or most meaningful items to make a representative personal page. With the advance of recommendation system, the user can easily find friends who have the similar life line or taste. With this fellow-interaction, they can establish friendship with same topic, understand each other and themselves better.

5.3 Social Museum to Demonstrate Human-Obejct Emotional Network

Social Museum is an in-App platform for encouraging crowdsourced museum to expand and demonstrate human-object emotional network. Every user can contribute their items or personal museum to make up social museum. By making up such a social museum, the specific emotion-driven user group could be formed up, providing the possibility of emotional consolation and resonance. For example, when a user propose a game console museum of 1990s, other users who have recorded the eligible item can add their game consoles and emotional memory into this crowdsourced museum, everybody can visit this museum and leave comments. The visitor will not only read the stories about the items but get to know about the owners who have such a special memory (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3.
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Social museum

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6 User Study by MVP Testing

To evaluate the value of our design, we conducted a first- use study of Wù Personal Museum (WPM). In particular, we were interested in validating that: (1) WPM supports users to record their belongings with least effort and more useful information, (2) WPM enables users to display their memory and emotion linking to the belonging, and (3) WPM encourages users to get emotional consolation and resonance from their records and social interaction.

We use MVP(Minimum Viable Product) to test our design. In this MVP, the user can take photos with enhanced filter, text note, hashtag and location label, manage and view belongings in Sudoku or timeline layout, share their own belongings and comment on the others’ item. We sent the MVP to the 20 in-depth interviews, asking them to choose 9 belongings and shot 1 photo for each of them. In addition, they were required to mark out a favorite item and write the story behind this item. Meanwhile, we observed their operating process and asked them to say whatever they are looking at, thinking, doing, and feeling as they go about their tasks when using the MVP. We gathered their feedback and synthesized the insights (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4.
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MVP testing result

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7 Discussion

Our user study insights have illustrated a rich picture of how users record their emotional link with their belongings through our personal museum. While users use this app for various purposes and indeed received more or less emotional resonance, the benefit of this emotional communication channel is still need to explore. In this section, we will discuss the insights and reflections of this novel personal museum.

7.1 Human-Computer Interaction Technology Enhances the Human-Object Emotional Relationship

In old times, it was not easy to capture an object or a moment by using multimedia. With the advance of HCI technology and smartphone, people can shot a photo or video, write notes and share the very moment instantly. Therefore, by using Wu Personal Museum, the threshold of recording human-object emotional memory has been much lowered which provides more possibilities for human interacting with the objects. As a result, the quantity, quality and frequency of human Human-Object emotional interaction are all improved with help of HCI Technology. The human’s attitude towards objects would also be changed with the development of HCI technology.

7.2 Abstract Emotion Becomes Tangible and Trackable on Objects

Emotion itself is abstract and intangible, and can only be felt by people via human interactions or pathetic affordance. By recording, visualizing and keeping human-object emotional memories, the emotion is embodied with the object and can develop with the object. In addition, with the form of a belonging-related photo, the memory can be brought with the owner and being recalled anytime. When looking at the photo captioned with user’s note, the owner and the audience can feel the relationship between human and object.

7.3 Personal History Should not be Ignored

In human history, the ordinary people’s personal history is an important branch with lots of under-discovered value and ignored status. Typically, building a public museum cost much social resource which make it mainly focus on displaying public history relic, while a dedicated personal museum is too expensive for ordinary people. The virtual personal museum with advantage of low cost, friendly use and easy spread could be a very promising exploring for documenting the personal history and fulfill the human history database. The Wu Personal Museum is just a primary trying and there are lots of possibilities for other researchers and practitioners to explore.

8 Conclusion and Future Study

This paper makes three contributions. First, we described a design research of investigating the attitudes of people towards various ways of keeping and sharing their belongings. Second, we described Wu Personal Museum, a mobile phone app supports users to record their belongings with least effort and more useful information, display their memory and emotion linking to the belonging, and get emotional consolation and resonance from their records and social interaction. As a result, it lowers the threshold for recording and sharing human-object emotional memories and encourages social interaction driven by the emotional memories. Finally, we presented insights from a MVP test study of Wu Personal Museum.

We plan to iterate Wu Personal Museum so it will be suitable for use wider range of users, including the elder citizens. This includes improving Wu Personal Museum’s user interface through responsive design adapted to multiple devices, as well as more simple and intuitive workflow to suit user’s mind model. We intend to further evaluate Wu Personal Museum’s strengths and limitations in recording and sharing human-object emotional memories. We also plan to conduct a longitudinal study in both research and educational settings.