At the heart of the design is the human experience: how to keep track of it?
Bitton, J., S. Agamanolis, and M. Karau, “RAW: Conveying minimally-mediated impressions of everyday life with an audio-photographic tool”. In Proceedings of CHI 2004.
In this paper, the authors write about a series of experiments performed using a binaural audio photographic tool. The aim of the research was to create a medium which could represent more accurately moments of everyday life without the intruding editorial mediations of thirds. The purpose of such a tool was to try to diminish cultural barriers by representing and reproducing everyday life in its purest, rawest form. The authors argue that this way, people might find ways to understand each other better, and represent cultures in a more accurate way.
The device holds a camera, and two binaural microphones that record one minute of sound before and one minute after a picture has been taken. The device doesn't allow users to either delete or modify the media once has been taken.
In mainstream media, sound has the solely purpose to accompany the image.The aim is to give both mediums, sound and image in the same relevance since the authors believe audio has big potential to convey emotions and reproduce situations accurately.
In the process, testing and receiving feedback from the participants was relevant for the development of a tool that would both give good results for the researchers (meaning good audio and image quality) but also satisfy the users while making the experience of documenting life pleasant. The first prototype was aimed to be used every hour of the day, but as the experiment advanced they reduced it to an 80 minute, and then to a 60 minutees usage time.
boyd, danah. 2007. “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life.” In MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning – Youth, Identity, and Digital Media Volume (ed. David Buckingham). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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