Constraints
The other day, I needed to delete stuff from my old phone. Since I just rarely had downloaded photos from it (a 1st generation cameraphone), I decided to download all photos again – just to be sure. So there I had a collection of about 40 photos, spanning the time I owned this phone, all sitting in one directory. The interesting thing is, that I have a rather strong memory and emotional connection to almost every single one of them. All of the time I’ve had at least one other digital camera with which I took thousands of pictures as well. And yet, here’s my tiny collection of technically crappy shots and it profoundly touches me.
I wonder (and I’m definitely not one of the people who despise endless storage and wish back the 36-exposures film) if it might have been the special constraints of this device that made me rarely take photos with it and therefore create a much more distilled collection of moments? The main constraints I was aware of, are limited storage and bad quality. The quality constraint might sound strange, especially regarding it as a benefit, but try seeing it this way: maybe I only took photos with it when I really, really wanted to, because I knew that the quality would be rather bad.
Introducing constraints to improve the quality of experience or memory sounds like an interesting design concept that might be worth keeping in mind. I actually used it with Buttons already – the fact that you can press the button only once is meant to limit the experience to just one possible moment and thus hopefully creating a memory of it which then will resonate in some way with the photo that appears on the screen later on.