I am in Geneva, Switzerland - for the lift conference for the 3rd time.
it has been really exciting for me to see how the lift team is evolving every year - and this year is no exception.

I found myself lucky enough to be at Mark Wubbens workshop this morning about “forgetful interfaces and the ever-ness of data”. which was really interesting. And as you probably will find out - I have more questions now than when I found myself at the workshop.

My idea was from the beginning that we don’t need to adress the ever-ness of data. But I got more and more enlightned by the talks. And there was a lot of talking going on.

I think what I thought the most about was the fact that:

before photos became digital we stored both good and bad photos because we had gone through “such a hard time” ( development time + money) to get them. They where kept in shoeboxes IRL or something like that.
The state of these photos for us was emotional - meaning that it was something we wanted to keep because it was a part of our documented past.
it’s kind off the same reason we keep books and nostalgic items. they are emotional.

So when photos became digital - we started storing everything on the computer ( and later on sharing this data on the web) because we could and we don’t really have to be selective about it - because it’s basically free to store data (1 picture more or less don’t make a huge difference)..

but how are we supposed to go “simple data living” and “clean up our data mess” ? should we really be using the time of evaluating every piece of data we keep stored whether its relevant or not ? is our data consumption becoming as greedy as consumption in general these days ?

just thinking about it makes me tired. do we really need to adress the ever-ness of data issue ? ( if there is an issue at all ?) are we gonna adress data overload from a consumption point of view in the future ?

is deleting the same as forgetting ? or how do you define “forgetting data”?

anyway we came up with a “recency index for data” at the workshop that could work ( and I liked personally) which was:

If the data hasn’t been tagged by us - it should be filed by location (gps)
if the data hasn’t been gps located - it should be dated.
if the data is dated - it should be compressed.

should data “fade away” when it becomes “unrecent” ?

what do you think ?