Daily randomised “Kodak-moment”

A Friday in October: I just took my first random Kodak-moment from the most uninteresting part of my bedroom floor. I realised too late that my new iPhone app automatically made a picture after the countdown. “ROOM for Thought”, created by Studio ROOM in the Netherlands, is a mobile app which alerts you every day at a random moment to take a picture. It first shows you a pointless few-second animation, and then you get three seconds to point the camera and wait for the picture to be taken.

I am usually too slow, resulting in blurred photographs of mundane nonsense. But the random pictures still provide a nice overall overview of the last few months: In the example-screenshot taken from the app you can see 4 days during my visit to Sydney last November. Although it seemed random at the time, it is actually all I need to remember the whole visit.

I never ignore the alert, which makes it a powerful conversation starter: I will take the photo, while explaining how enslaved I am by both this app and my PhD research. Next thing you know everyone in the room is sliding through the still images of my everyday life and asking questions about it. For me the power of this application lies in talking about it, because without my story none of it makes sense.

January 16 2014, 14:56 while riding my bicycle – quickly point at something! 3…2…1… Snap! Photo Nr. 94 has been added to my collection of 34.175.

Will I remember today?

 

In chronological order: the rainy car ride to Hunter Valley, breakfast at the StudyHouse, our nice office space, and the daily stop at the local coffee corner.
In chronological order: the rainy car ride to Hunter Valley, breakfast at the StudyHouse, our nice office space, and the daily stop at the local coffee corner.

 

Mendel

About Mendel

Mendel Broekhuijsen has a background in Industrial Design, with both Bachelor and Master degrees obtained from Eindhoven University of Technology. His graduation project about the Future of Nostalgia was concluded with the design of an application that enables people to create a personal collection of memory-inducing music. He continued to work on his passion for the value of digital media in his PhD project, supervised by Elise van den Hoven & Panos Markopoulos, which he completed with his defence on October 22, 2018. Since February 2018 he works as Senior Innovation Engineer at Qwiek.

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