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Home curation versus teenage photography: Photo displays in the family home

This paper documents a design research study about photographic portrayals of family at home. Pioneering a new interdisciplinary method combining social psychology and design (with broad applicability to Interaction Design), the findings illustrate how intergenerational power dynamics within families, specifically between parents and teenage children, significantly shape how photos are displayed at home to represent the family. The findings further show how the transition to digital photography from film, in terms of the adoption of new tools and practices, may greatly impact the authorial control that parents’ express over family representation. Findings highlight the conflict of interests within teen and parent photography practices and the challenges that this presents for supporting family representation through the design of photo display technology.

The reported study was timely given the recent market dominance of digital photography, the contemporary proliferation of digital capture devices amongst teenagers, the unprecedented volume of photographic content that teens generate, and the emerging networked display platforms (e.g. social media) that people use to represent themselves. The shift to digital, coupled with the emergence of innovative digital photo display technologies, was a socio-technical moment that made this study of significant interest to the industrial partner (Microsoft Research), and its research themes.

The study delivered implications for digital photoware to inform these themes. It led to the development of original photo display design prototypes competitively exhibited at ‘Microsoft Techfest’ (company annual showcase) and ‘CHI Interactivity’ (a premier international conference for Interaction Design); this design development was documented in a Best Paper (top 1% of submissions) at the British-HCI conference (2009).

IJHCS provides an impactful platform for disseminating the research; it is a top-three Human-computer Interaction journal (five-year impact factor 1.968). The research reported in the paper provided extensive material for Sarvas and Frohlich’s (2011) Springer CSCW series book.