Crafting Temporality in Design: Introducing a Designer-Researcher Approach Through the Creation of Chronoscope

We now live in a world where digital technologies mediate many aspects of people’s everyday lives, and this situation challenges design-led research as it struggles to adapt its methods to the speed of rapid technological change. The convergence of social, cloud, and mobile computing have made it easy for people to stay constantly connected and to create and share personal data at rates faster and scales larger than ever before. For example, social media services currently receive approximately 21,000 photo uploads per second and 657 billion photos annually. These new technologies have enabled people to create vast digital archives that capture their personal history and life experiences, which can be valuable resources for connecting with others and reflecting on one’s own life. Technological trends toward constant connectivity and the proliferation of personal data have opened many benefits. However, wide-ranging experiences of overload are emerging as people struggle to make sense of the masses of digital data they now create and receive. People are experiencing loss of control over the digital archives that capture their life experiences as they become oversaturated and fragmented. Therefore, there is a clear need to develop new ways to support people in making sense of their ever-increasing archives.