Compiling research done so far: current research themes

(I) What makes retirement successful/happy?

(II) Designing for older people

• Building existing habits and technologies that older people are already used to (cf. unimelb thing)

(III) Objects, things, digital possessions/mementos/legacies (materiality)

Lost in Translation: Understanding the Possession of Digital Things in the Cloud

(Features of digital things/artefacts that encourages people to transfer from physical to digital possessions)

AutoTopography What can physical mementos tell us about digital memories

Easy on the trigger dad: a study of long term family photo retrieval

• Sharing/commenting on things:- makes digital artefacts seem more valuable
• 24/7 accessibility

Cf. Mobile attachment

Invisible Connections: investigating Older People's Emotions and social relations around objects (Vaisutis)

Digital inheritance - Igor Nai Fovino (Global cyber security center)

"How much is your digital life worth? Should your inheritance include your digital posessions"

(IV) Cloud computing/collective memory/collaborative memory

What leads to a happy retirement? (Australia)

Original Article

This article is a quick guide written by Michael who is an internationally published consulting psychologist specializing in the psychological challenges facing people at various points in their lives. He mentions the fact that many people always ask about ‘how can anyone not enjoy the freedom of life in retirement?’. The author states that one of the reasons is that going to work is not just about income, it has many social and personal benefits:

1.    Work usually provides a sense of purpose.

2.    It increases the sense of achievement and self esteem by utilizing our skills.

3.    It provides us with a sense of structure.

4.    Fulfills social needs.

Based on all these reasons, the author finds that Australian retirees who involved in ‘purposeful activities’ for more than five hours per week faced lower level of emotional problems. Some of these ‘purposeful activities’ include:

1.    Producing tangible products such as painting.

2.    Providing service such as community work.

3.    Self-development such as health improvement.

All these activities help retirees to feel that there is a balance in their lives and to maintain healthy levels of self-esteem.

Finally, the author advices people to commence some of these ‘purposeful activities’ while working which will ease their way into retirement instead of suddenly facing a plenty of time without knowing what to do and leads to a decrease on feeling lost and aimless that retirees usually feel.  

Retirement: A major Life Transition

Original Article

This is a journal article that provides an overview of why retirement is a transition and what are the causes of some problems that occur during this movement. As stated by the author, the transition is a finite period which has a beginning and an end and it is a state that is different from what was and what will be, which might be confusing or emotional. This transition usually involves new potentials and significant decisions. He considers retirement as a kind of social anomie by moving from working to retirement.

The author stresses the importance of considering life planning (subjective) as well as financial planning (objective) sides of retirement before it arrives, instead of focusing mainly on the financial aspects. He believes that retirement is more of an emotional than financial experience and people should plan for retirement by thinking about how they are going to spend their money to achieve their desires. One way for doing this is using Bliss List exercise in which people write their visions of how they’d like to spend their lives after retirement without considering any financial limitations. Subsequently, they will prioritize these goals to get a list of the highest goals and depending on their assets they are going achieve some of them. This list helps people to answer the question: How they want to live life?

However, some people may find it difficult to figure out what they really want?. This may lead them to stuck in the life planning or for some of them; they might become depressed when they can’t afford their goals. For those people, the author suggests consulting therapists or life coaches to help them to overcome difficulties they are facing in this stage of their lives and knowing about the experiences of other people especially who had the same circumstances and feelings.

Teenagers and their virtual possessions: design opportunities and issues

Odom, W., Zimmerman, J., & Forlizzi, J. (2011). Teenagers and their virtual possessions:design opportunities and issues. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Vancouver, BC, Canada.

This paper illustrates a study conducted to assess how the value of virtual possessions is constructed among people, and how people differ from each other in the perception of this value, by focusing on adolescents only as an important group. The study uses a semi-structured interview to understand participants’ everyday lives, their behaviour, how they use technology, and what their valuable materials and virtual possessions are. The findings show that adolescents usually keep various amounts of virtual possessions in different forms, and they mostly are heavy users of digital media. Moreover, they tend to store all these possessions in cloud services where there is no access limitation, and the storage space is more than sufficient. Furthermore, the vast majority of the participants use these possessions as representative of their identities to specific audiences through the privacy settings of their service provider. Finally, it finds that metadata plays a significant role in adding value to virtual possessions by personalising or linking these possessions to friends. The authors suggest three areas that could be exploited to build value to these possessions, which are: accrual of metadata, placelessness  and presence, and presentation of self to multiple audiences. 

      It contributes to HCI by providing a designer way of thinking about virtual possessions, which thus gives designers a better understating of how they could initiate or boost value of virtual possessions while considering material-possession attachment and research on material practices. Based on the authors’ suggestions, this could be achieved in many ways. One way is by increasing the content a user can inject into metadata that results in more representative possessions for an individual or a group. Another way is designing for cloud computing, where the user could access and exchange virtual possessions between different online repositories while considering the storage space.