Rebulb

Journey to My Past: Exploring and Journaling Past Memories Evoked by Questions Framed as Proud Moments

ACM CHI 2025, April 2025, ACM

Abstract: Accumulating a life history is a valuable resource for understanding self and reflecting on personal historical experience, which could be developed through diary writing. To facilitate the recording of past events in a diary, we designed and implemented Rebulb, a system that enables users to engage with reflective questions about proud moments and document memories evoked for accumulating one's life history. Our four-month field study with three participants showed that users intentionally and spontaneously recalled vague and wide memories during their daily activity and then concretized these memories by writing them down in a journal. The study also revealed that regardless of whether the memories were positive or negative, the current state of the user played a crucial role in how these memories were processed and reflected upon. Our finding imply consideration in designing a tool for supporting the recall and documentation of past experiences.

Keywords: Diary, Everyday artifact, Home, Past memory

Citation format:
Sangsu Jang, Nari Kim, Nanum Kim, Jin-young Moon, Choong-Wan Woo, and Young-Woo Park. 2025. Journey to My Past: Exploring and Journaling Past Memories Evoked by Questions Framed as Proud Moments. In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 983, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713215