A life story in three parts: the use of triptychs to make sense of personal digital data

Abstract

Many social media platforms support the curation of personal digital data, and, more recently, the use of that data for review and reflection. We explored the process of reflection by asking users to create a meaningful ‘triptych’ of photographs drawn from their Facebook accounts. In a first study, we asked participants to manually trawl their own accounts and select three relevant images, which we then framed and used as an interview probe. In a second study, we designed an automated triptych generation system and assessed participants’ experiences of using this system. We conducted qualitative analyses of participant interviews from both studies. Consistent with other ‘slow technology’ work, we found the act of creating a physical artefact from social media data gave that data new meaning, albeit with notable differences between manual versus automatically generated triptychs. We conclude by discussing possible improvements to the design of the automated triptych system.