Memory Tracer & Memory Compass: Investigating Personal Location Histories as a Design Material for Everyday Reminiscence
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With the massive adoption of smartphones, location trackers, and GPS-based applications, data is being generated that captures people's geographic locations in more precise detail than ever before. Personal location history archives offer a potentially valuable and overlooked resource for supporting reminiscence and recollection of the past. Yet, little design research has explored how location histories can be used as a material in designing such experiences. To investigate this space, we engaged in a practice-based design research process that resulted in two design artifacts. Memory Tracer is a tangible device that occasionally, yet perpetually surfaces locations from the past bound to today's date. Memory Compass is a smartwatch application that uses a ‘casting’ interaction enabling a user to retrieve and explore locations from their past, across space and time. We unpack and reflect on key decisions in our design process and conclude with opportunities for future HCI research and practice.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it