Interactive Polaroids

Using loved but forgotten photos to create meaningful experiences

Interactive Polaroids connects people with photos they love but never look at through a novel interaction. As part of a group project in a course about Tangible Interactions I carried out guided tours in the homes of people to investigate their relationships to personal belongings, led workshops, analyzed collected data to find themes and connections, designed and built a working digital prototype and ran a summative evaluation of the project, for which we received the highest grade.

The end result is a product that creates meaningful and warm experiences through interactions with personal photos. The product, which can hang on a wall or be placed on a table just like any other photo frame, displays a photo picked from a pool of photos provided by the user, after a while (between a day or a few weeks) the photo starts to fade away, gently prompting the user to interact with it. Once the frame is shaken, a new photo fades in, creating an emotionally meaningful moment that can bring calm and happiness.

In the video below, me and my project team presents our design process and the purpose of Interactive Polaroids and reflects on learnings from the project.

Skills & tools used

User research, facilitating workshop, low- and high-fidelity prototyping. Final prototype built with Raspberry Pi and Python (and lots of foamcore).

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