Design Story Sharing around the Table Conceptual Model Design Pdh Usage Scenario: Meeting with a Friend at a Café Implicit Formulation of Visual Queries Interface Design

15 One of the most enjoyable parts of life is sharing our experiences with others, whether with family over dinner, friends we see occasionally, relatives who live far away, people within our community, or colleagues we work with. People often use records of their past, such as photographs, videos, and various types of documents , as tangible conversation starters to share their stories and to build a shared culture and history. In the past 10 years, we have informally observed where and how people share photos and other supporting documents. Figure 1 is a table at which people have laid out their photos randomly for others to view. Recent advances in technology have made it possible to easily amass large collections of digital recordings of our daily lives. These media offer opportuni-17 16 i n t e r a c t i o n s. .. m a r c h + a p r i l 2 0 0 3 ties for new user experiences beyond conventional digital photo albums [1, 2]. In this article, we describe the design of the Personal Digital Historian (PDH), an interactive system that facilitates face-to-face conversation and story sharing. PDH uses a specially configured digital tabletop, on which images related to the story can be easily displayed and viewed by everyone. In this system, users select stored digital archives such as photographs, video, and text documents and display the images grouped by people, time, place, or events, while the story is being told. By using the term " story sharing " instead of storytelling, we emphasize in our design the supporting of interaction and conversation among the participants, rather than the performance of a storyteller. Hence, our design focuses on providing the right tools and visualizations for the listeners of the story as well as the story sharers. (See the sidebar, " PDH Usage Scenario, " for a sample interaction scenario.) Our goal is to provide a new digital content user interface and management system allowing face-to-face casual exploration and visuali-zation of digital contents. Figure 2a is an artistic rendering that embodied our vision of the PDH table at the beginning of our design phase in the fall of 2000. The current PDH table is implemented using our DiamondSpin (www.merl.com/projects/diamond-spin) circular tabletop Java toolkit. Unlike conventional , single-user, desktop, user interfaces, DiamondSpin is intended for multiuser collaborative applications. For the physical PDH table, …