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.