How Deep Is Your Love: Deep Narratives of Ensoulment and Heirloom Status

One of our ongoing research agenda in sustainable interaction design is the exploration of why people keep and care about some things and not others as an issue of sustainable practices to inform the design of interactive digital things. This study introduces a method we call deep narratives, which is targeted as a means to understand particular relationships between people and particular things at a deeply reflective level. This method is a complement to other existing methods—including ethnographies, surveys, and personal narratives. However, the method of deep narratives is not itself the main contribution of our work. Rather, the search for principles of sustainability as a driver of interaction design— specifically, the search for the links from particular and rich stories of things to meaningful design implications for creating ensouled, heirloom status objects—is the contribution of this study. The core idea of deep narratives is the deep examination of very specific possessions that study participants indicate are deeply loved, rather than whole collections of possessions as it has been done in previous studies with personal inventories (Blevis & Stolterman, 2007; Odom, Pierce, Blevis, & Stolterman, 2009), socio-psychological approaches (Csíkszentmihályi & Rochberg-Halton, 1981), or socio-cultural approaches (Belk, 1995; McCracken, 1988). By the notion of deep love, we mean simply and somewhat metaphorically to describe and name whatever it is that motivates lasting relationships between people and things. Our goal is to reflect on these very specific instances in order to postulate—without hoping to prove for a general case— design principles that may promote more sustainable behaviors with respect to owned things.