An Underdeveloped Metaphor: The Mismatched Designs and Motivations of Digital Picture Interactions

Abstract

Picture interactions are key to daily and long-term social connections between families and communities, especially through reminiscence. Across the nearly 200-year history of domestic photography, this social reminiscence has been accomplished largely through photo albums. However, in the now common digital setting, albums are pushed aside for the endless film roll metaphor. In this article, we explore this metaphor through the 20-year history of proposed digital picture interactions from Human–Computer Interaction research, and compare this to ongoing interactions with modern picture tools. Through these, we reveal that this prominent design metaphor does not create space for social reminiscence, but does fit the novel use of immediate sharing seen across social networking. Furthermore, the endless and ever-growing nature of digital film rolls are not meaningfully browsable for either intended use. We close by reconnecting to the past works that explore the broad potential of digital pictures.