Total capture produced enormous archives and no compelling applications. The authors’ prescription: design from the psychology of human memory, support the five Rs — recollecting, reminiscing, retrieving, reflecting, remembering intentions — and work with human memory rather than trying to replace it.
How it was done
A critical review of a decade of lifelogging research, assessing what wholesale capture systems actually delivered against what they promised.
What it means
The failure was not technical. The systems captured successfully. What they could not do was make the resulting archive worth opening, and an archive nobody opens is indistinguishable from no archive.
The prescription is a design constraint: capture selectively, cue rather than replace, and be able to say which of the five Rs each feature actually serves.
Fifteen years on, the same failure mode is available to anyone building capture tools with cheaper storage and better transcription. Neither of those was the bottleneck.