STUDENT
COURSE
MENTOR
partner
MENTOR
SDG
This thesis explores the value and care in personal digital archives through participatory methods, focusing on people born around the millennium. As one of the first generations to grow up with personal digital devices from early childhood, this generation’s memories are deeply tied to technology and platforms that are often unstable and impermanent.
Through interviews, probe study, workshops and an exhibition, I aimed to invite people to think about their own digital archive, from recognizing their digital belongings as an archive to considering their value, to reflecting on what caring for them could look like. Rather than prescribing certain behaviours or attitudes, I hoped to create opportunities for introspection and discussion.
The final outcome of the project is a participatory pop-up exhibition, complemented by a small self-publication that invites personal reflection throughout the exhibition and after. With this work, I hoped to create opportunities for seeing how valuable our digital belongings can be, open a discussion on what role technology plays in safeguarding them and whatcaring for them means, as well as inspire people towards small actions of care.
This project is situated and shaped by my own position as someone being very close to my target audience’s generation—with a younger sister exactly born in millennium—and geographically focused on the Baltics, partly because of my own location, but also because existing research on born-digital materials has not addressed this region.
