One of the slides from my presentation.
Frankly, I’ve pretty much reached the point of exhaustion with tracking my life through the Archive. It’s been over a decade of meticulously shooting, collecting, prepping, organizing and assembling as many data channels as possible into a single “scrapbook on crack” stream. At 19 volumes, this project that has fed most of my OCD tendencies, needs to take on a new form so that I can get on with my life.
I didn’t fully realize what I needed in an interface to execute this phase change until I was intensely interviewed (for 3 hours) last November by a team from Jump Associates. Apparently I met the requirements for an “extreme user” of notebook documentation and thus made the perfect subject to probe for ideas. The session turned into therapy for me as I dolled out all my “in a perfect world” scenarios for documenting my life.
The key take-away for me was that this new interface MUST be tangible. If I can’t move stuff around with my hands, feel textures, physically arrange images/ideas/data in a space, then it just ain’t gonna work for me.
The problem is that the technology just hasn’t fully arrived yet. But there is some cool stuff out there for content access (a la Minority Report, but called the g-speak spatial operating environment) and for content entry/interaction (who hasn’t seen Pattie Maes & Pranav Mistry’s TED talk from last year?).
The questions is, how do you combine these technologies (instant tangible data entry with instant tangible data access)? I want to gather information, sort it, rank it, edit it and then store it in the appropriate category all within a few simple moves. In fact, maybe I could turn it into an interpretive dance…
I’m going to speak about this during the Quantified Self Meet-Up next Wednesday the MedHelp offices at 927 Market Street.
#1 by Erik - January 19th, 2010 at 05:50
I always wondered why you created “the archive”, I think i’m starting to understand now. I understand the need for things to have some sort of physical presence but sometimes I wonder if this is just a cultural/generational issue that will dissolve for the future but remain our problem until we are gone. In a way we all have been embracing the non-physical with digital music, movies, etc but for me it didn’t really start to get serious until I started trying to live a paperless life. I bought a high speed scanner and started scanning everything in sight combined with all sorts of software for rapid and free form access to my data…however one look at my office and you will know I haven’t succeeded yet, but i’m resolved to get there at some point…
Keep blogging on this topic, i’m really interested on where you take this and end up!
#2 by Maren - January 22nd, 2010 at 06:54
Hi Erik,
It wasn’t immediately apparent why I started keeping the Archive all those years ago but the need to keep it has persisted. I think it is in response to the massive overload of information we deal with each day, it’s a filtering and prioritizing response to not lose the memories that are worth keeping. In large part, it also has to do with the fact that I saw my grandmother spend the last 15 years of her life alone and lonely – at 19 volumes, the Archive almost has the mass of someone who remembers your whole life and will always be there for you….