Digital Christmas

Capturing Family Rituals and the Passing of Time

Part of Daniela's strand of research on personal memories, this study looked at Christmas and the strings of memories it creates, within the family, from early childhood to old age.

Eight families participated in the first study aiming at shading lights on the rituals different families display at Christmas. A strong idiosyncratic attitude emerged within a common framework of preparation, celebration, and putting away. Besides individual differences, a common pattern emerges: an extended preparation is carried out by the hosting household over a few weeks to set up the celebration and build expectations; preparation gives way to a short but intense celebration shared with the family or intimate friends; then decorations are stored and there is a return to normal life.

The celebration is always across generations and everyone takes part. As the dynamic in the individuals and the family change, such as new partnership and newborn children, new rituals are created, often intentionally. What is conspicuously absent is technology, in all its form: banned from the family gathering to the point that even a phone call feels irritating.

This study was then the inspiration of a number of concepts for a range of interactive bespoke devices used to further explore if, and if so how, digital technology could help the creation of Christmas tradition and support the family celebration. Provocative prototypes were created and explored within the context of a Christmas workshop with some of the participants in the previous study.

A sound bauble was then deployed to the families the following year as a technology probe to further investigate the role of such devices within the family celebration.

Project dates
2019

Publications

PETRELLI, Daniela and LIGHT, Ann (2014). Family rituals and the potential for interaction design: a study of Christmas. Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 21 (3), p. 16. PDF available here

PETRELLI, Daniela, BOWEN, Simon, DULAKE, Nick and LIGHT, Ann (2012). Digital Christmas: an exploration of festive technology. In: DIS '12 : Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference. New York, N.Y., ACM, 348-357.

LIGHT, Ann Light and PETRELLI, Daniela (2014). The rhythm of Christmas: temporality, ICT use and design for the idiosyncrasies of a major festival. In Proceedings of the 26th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference on Designing Futures: the Future of Design (OzCHI '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 159-167.

Research by

Daniela Petrelli

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Funders