Slots-Memento : A System Facilitating Intergenerational Story Sharing and Preservation of Family Mementos

TL;DR

Slots-Memento is a family-oriented system with a slot machine-like device and flash drive that facilitates sharing, storytelling, and preserving family mementos, especially engaging elderly users in the process.

Contribution

This paper introduces a novel system combining a physical device and digital storage to enhance intergenerational storytelling and preservation of family mementos.

Findings

Elderly users understood and accepted the system.

Photos of mementos effectively triggered memory recall.

The system increased elderly users' awareness and desire to share family stories.

Abstract

Family mementos document events shaping family life, telling a story within and between family members. The elderly collected some mementos for children, but never recorded stories related to those objects. In this paper, in order to understand the status quo of memento storytelling and sharing of elderly people, contextual inquiry was conducted, which further helped us to identify design opportunities and requirements. Resulting design was defined after brainstorm and user consultation, which was Slots- Memento, a system consisting a slot machine-like device used by the elderly and a flash drive used by the young. The Slots machine-like device utilizes with the metaphor of slots machine, which integrates functions of memento photo displaying, story recording, and preservation. In the flash disk, the young could copy memento photos to it. The system aims to facilitate memento story sharing and preservation within family members. Preliminary evaluation and user test were conducted in evaluation section, the results showed that Slots-Memento was understood and accepted by the elderly users. Photos of mementos were easy to recall memories. It enabled the elderly people to be aware of the stories of the family mementos, as well as aroused their desire to share them with family members. Related research methodology includes contextual inquiry, brainstorming, prototyping, scenario creation, and user test.