To Flee the Trash Mountain of Our Own Data, We Need Gadgets That Engage with Us

As much as gadget manufacturers would love you to believe their latest phone is the Ferrari of the information highway, what we're all really driving are digital garbage trucks, piled high with apps, interactions, and content (all important content!) that have been tossed into a scrap heap that, in the days before we preserved every moment of our lives, was reserved for our analog memories.

At a global scale, this pathologically self-aggrandizing behavior is perhaps concerning simply because our human record now consists overwhelmingly of micromemes whose lack of seriousness we can only pray future archeologists will understand, lest they think human civilization went from Rembrandt to Reddit in the blink of a badly-pixelated puking-humping-dog GIF. (Perhaps aliens have read our radio emissions after all, and their continued silence in the face of our prodigious noise is the biggest downvote of them all.)

But on a more individual level, what the hell are we supposed to do with all these mountains of stuff we've accumulated? Basically, we can't get enough of filling our devices with things we've collected—I can't be the only one who feels like he's physically shoving things into his smartphones at times—and we'll probably never kick the habit. So how can we accept that, and make our own personal archives more useful?

Photos are a good example. In a widely-cited 2011 blog post, 1000 Memories explained the number of photographs produced each year has shown exponential growth over the last century or more. 1000 Memories pegged the total number of photos produced that year at 380 billion; this year, that number is expected to reach 880 billion.

Thanks to the continued growth of the smartphone market, easy-to-use and seemingly limitless cloud storage, and the endless march of social networks just begging you to share more photos, we're all marching through our lives hunched under an invisible mountain of drunken Instagrams of bar toilet graffiti and X-Files Vines we take, partly because of how goddamn great it feels when someone cool favorites your tweet, but largely because there's no real cost to any of it.

I've got multiple backup hard drives full of pictures and music that I know I really like because I'm convinced that I'd be super devastated if they all disappeared, but I never actually use them; there's no way in hell I'm ever going to find a use for tweets I tweeted years ago, but rest assured that I'd be super pissed if Twitter decided to erase the archive.

A major part of the problem is that, for as much as our devices are an integral part of our day-to-day, the relationship is largely one-sided. You stuff your phone, DSLR, and Flickr account full of photos, and while they all dutifully do your bidding, that's the extent of the interaction. So while your phone knows a lot more about your own e-mountain than you do, it doesn't actually do anything about it; it just waits patiently for you to remember that one awesome bowl of ramen you had nine months ago and furiously scroll for a picture.

What if your phone was instead a bit more actively engaged with you? Photobox, developed in a joint program led by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft Research Cambridge, suggests an answer. Photobox is exactly what it sounds like: a wooden box that randomly prints photos from a user's Flickr profile.

The researchers call Photobox a "slow technology," and described it in a 2012 paper as "an interactive technology intended to be used over many years." In design and purpose, Photobox (which is not to be confused with the printing company of the same name) is meant to resemble an heirloom—it sits someone in your house like an antique music box, and when you open it up, it may have printed an actual, real-life photo from somewhere deep in your archives. The goal is to present a new method for engaging with the digital ephemera we've forgotten about.

"How will digital photo collections be meaningfully experienced over time as they grow to a size and scale that people have never previously encountered?" Photobox's creators write in that 2012 prototype paper. "How will these archives be passed down to other people or generations in the future, and how will they become meaningful?"

At the CHI conference today, the team is presenting the results of a 14-month Photobox trial in which Photobox's Bluetooth-connected printer spit out four to five 2x3" photos randomly each month. They found that Photobox printing turned looking at photos from a way of killing time to a bonafide event.

“We were all a little curious … wondering who might be in the next photo,” one study subject, who shared Photobox with a house full of roommates, said in a CMU release. “Sometimes we’d all be here and looking at the photos and asking (the Flickr account holder) about them. Like, why one of us was in one but someone else wasn’t.”

Part of the phenomenon is surely due to the fact that photos just feel nicer to look at when they're physically in your hand, and largely a result of the slow technology concept—that tech shouldn't flood you with such endless updates.

As Photobox creators note, the slow technology concept was presented by Lars Hallnäs and Johan Redström in 2001 paper that's truly prescient in its assessment of tech design's endless obsession with efficiency, and how design changes as electronics shift from being focused on periods of explicit use—say, your printer—to ubiquitous technology, like your smartphone or smart home.

"As computers are increasingly woven into the fabric of everyday life, interaction design may have to change—from creating only fast and efficient tools to be used during a limited time in specific situations, to creating technology that surrounds us and therefore is a part of our activities for long periods of time," they write in their abstract. "We present slow technology: a design agenda for technology aimed at reflection and moments of mental rest rather than efficiency in performance."

Slow technology is a pushback to a simple truth of our gadgets today: they're always there, they're always on, and there's always something new to look at. It's turned us into hamsters running on an endless wheel of social feeds, into drones who close Twitter on their phone, only to automatically open it again.

As compelling as any idea to break that cycle is, Photobox also highlights another way our gadgets can do a better job of working with us. By inserting a bit of randomness into the mix, Photobox not only helps unearth old memories, but also helps define more discrete terms for how it should be used.

Imagine if your phone was a bit more proactive in engaging with you—and not via a faux-artificially intelligent butler like Siri, but by actually initiating its usage by, say, randomly popping up a blank text message to some random person from your phone book, or collating a pile of tweets and saying "Hey, what do you think of this?" At the very least, it might help one stop checking every status update as obsessively as we do now, especially since every time we look at Twitter is simply a random snapshot of what's happening on there at that time anyway.

That power of randomness to define your interactions with tech has been on my mind since I interviewed Darius Kazemi, who in 2012 wrote a program for randomly buying things on Amazon called Random Shopper. (That I'm having trouble believing said interview happened more than a year ago is the perfect example of how our lack of discrete human-tech interactions turns our digital history into one long blur.)

Kazemi said his inspiration came from working in the heavily analytics-driven world of mobile and Facebook gaming, where gameplay mechanics are designed to be as addictive as possible to as many people as possible. "I think a lot of the fun things that happen in games are the things you don’t plan as a developer, and to squash people’s activities that happen outside of that acceptable margin of error is not something that I like," he said then.

The immediate benefit of randomness is that, by not knowing what you're going to get, you pay a lot more attention to what you receive in the end. And that's the truly compelling angle to slow technology that Photobox embodies: By breaking us out of our self-inflicted Möbius strip of internet consumption, tech that's both slow and random could help us actually care about the trail of memories and snapshots we all create.

Of course, it sounds simpler than it actually is; having a printer send you an occasional photo from somewhere in your archives is a far better way to share old memories than dumping 10,000 photos into Flickr, but a smartphone that only lets you call people when it decides you should would be a disaster.

Part of the problem lies in making tech more discrete. Our phones are omnibuses of gadgets, which makes them hard to put down or actively enjoy for any one thing. Compare gaming on your phone to a console, or shooting photos with your phone and a camera; when a gadget has a specific use that it does well, it's probably going to suck you in more to doing that thing.

But if we're going to have to deal with what the cloud created—an endless amount of data, memories, and interactions that can be delivered anywhere, at any time, on any device—we'll have to figure out a model that shifts beyond whatever's latest and most popular. While slow technology won't always apply, the precept that we should focus on making events, large or small, definitely does. And at the end of the day, as we trudge through life dragging an infinitely-large bindle of ones and zeros behind us, having devices that can occasionally say "Hey, remember this?" will go a long way towards cutting through the useless clutter.