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Today’s stories
memories in boxes
The idea behind Today’s Stories was born out of a parent’s frustration. When I pick up my daughter from pre–school she rarely talks about what happened during her day; yet sometimes something small–a bruise on her knee, a drawing, socks she is wearing that are not hers–will be enough to trigger off and develop into an exchange which (to my mind at least) has didactic value. If only there were more such ways to tie into the memories of a day.
No, the idea is not to develop a “big brother” to watch over her and tell me everything at the end of her day, or for me to be virtually present in the classroom. What we are working towards is a way of keeping an interesting record of episodes, and of relating them to each other and to a variety of secondary material. This could stimulate parents, teachers or other people involved in a child’s education to reflect thoughtfully on their child’s experiences. The residue of such a simple experiment in living would be a multi–media document with cartoon–like status, that can be kept for future reference, given away as a present, or elaborated on with other kids.
“Dido came running enthusiastically across the schoolyard, and showed me a cartoon that she had ‘lived in’ that day. It was a simple printout only–the real thing could, as usual, be accessed on the Web with the Smart Flippo that she kept safely in her pocket. The drawings told the story of two children that want to play only with each other–one of them might have been her, but I was not sure. A third figure carried a sad expression, which was accentuated by a stylised tear. Hearts, lightning and smiley faces illustrated some of the other feelings involved. While she explained I was surprised to hear her use words like jealousy, friendship, sadness. As I tried to concentrate on the road, we developed some alternative interpretations. By the time we got home Dido had decided to email the drawing to Lotte–apparently she was the sad one in the episode–and to play with her the day after.”
Today’s Stories develops a way of stimulating a child’s reflections on early life experiences through the creative and collaborative composition of stories using a wearable device, the KidsCam, which captures short sequences that are of interest in the course of the child’s day. This can be done on demand (giving the tool a broad educational use), but the KidsCam will also spontaneously retain an episode that leads up to an interesting event. Considered as a single device, it provides a fragmented history of the child’s day from its own perspective. The crucial insight, however, is that the histories gathered from the perspectives of different children in the same group are interrelated. So one way to think about a collection of KidsCam devices is as a kind of hyper–camera that effectively produces a series of interleaved episodes, some of them capturing the same events but from different perspectives. They are connected by the encounters that children have with each other. I always compare this to the movie Short Cuts, in which a dozen people’s lives interfere with each other–through love, by accident, and so on. Even brief encounters leave traces and may change lives.
Memory Boxes are a first incarnation of some of the ideas in the project. A Memory Box can be used to collect memories of objects, places or people which have been marked by our special Memory Tags. By opening the little box in the presence of objects, places or people, a memory of them is stored into the box. Technically, a memory is a pointer to a multi – media document that is associated with a thing–but not necessarily a representation of it. By opening a box next to a computer screen its content is visualised. By opening boxes next to each other their contents are mixed. And by shaking a box it is emptied.
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The Stories interface creates annotated cartoon-like abstractions
based on material collected during the children's day. |
What is interesting about the Memory Box is that it moves away from the pure camera–idea: a record of something can be many things. Visualising the content of a memory box highlights interesting issues: is it just a bunch of things, an ordered collection or a time sequence? How long is it, and is it displayed in one shot or in several ones? It will be crucial to provide a way of organising the material
that encourages the construction of a concise and relevant story. We have several ideas in this respect. For instance we will be adding an emotional snapshot to what is being captured, to enable 'affective navigation' through the material. In order to create an interesting structure, we plan to use myths (for instance, Dido and Aeneas could be used to structure stories around love, jealousy, despair, frustration, obligation, and so on), works of art (for example, the paintings of Hundertwasser, in whose house the Stories kick–off meeting was held, are like modern allegories), or other lessons on living. A strong point is that the structures and the secondary material that is being used to annotate the stories can be extended to remain relevant for all ages (e.g. contemporary news items on conflict, reconciliation, ethics, and so on...).
Whether Today’s Stories develops into something useful remains to be seen. I personally see it as a new type of tool that takes note of things in an inherently dialectical way: as it records events it also links them to other perspectives on the same events, as well as to similar perspectives on other episodes. And as the child grows older the technology will grow with it into a realm of ever richer associations, building up a sediment of tiny experiments in living.
Stories website:
http://stories.starlab.org
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