The reflexive printer: toward making sense of perceived drawbacks in technology-mediated reminiscence

The Reflexive Printer is a physical artifact combined with a mobile application. It allows digital-photo natives to enrich their experiences of daily reminiscence. Each day, the system takes one picture from a user's smartphone album, prints it on thermal paper as a halftone image, and deletes it from the smartphone. With a critical lens, we reframe technology-mediated reminiscence as an intersubjective interaction between human and artifact. In this mutually informed relationship, we propose perceived drawbacks as a design quality for provoking the critical sensibilities of users and engaging them in transgressing the normality of digital photo consumption. We focus our design thinking on three themes: simple materiality and monological performance, fast consumption and slow rumination, and powerful artifact and feeble user. This paper describes the initial lessons that we have learned through this critical making process and highlights several insights that HCI communities can leverage in the future.