The Phenomenology of Remembered Experience: A Repertoire for Design

Abstract

There is a growing interest in interactive technologies that support remembering by considering functional, experiential, and emotional support to their users. Design driven research benefits from an understanding of how people experience autobiographical remembering. We present a phenomenological study in which twenty-two adults were interviewed using the repertory grid technique; we aimed at soliciting personal constructs that characterize people's remembered experiences. Inductive coding revealed that 77,8% of identified constructs could be reliably coded in five categories referring to contentment, confidence/unease, social interactions, reflection, and intensity. These results align with earlier classifications of personal constructs and models of human emotion. The categorization derived from this study provides an empirically founded characterization of the design space of technologies for supporting remembering. We discuss its potential value as a tool for evaluating interactive systems in relation to personal and social memory talk, and outline future improvements.