PhotoThings is a design project exploring how young children can engage with personal photo archives through tangible, physical–digital artefacts. Two artefacts were developed to give our daughter self-directed access to her photo archive: Lines, a physical measuring tape that maps photographs onto a tangible timeline, and Wheels, a circular spinner device fitted with interchangeable RFID-tagged wheels that each open a different structured view — by date, person, place, or theme.
The work is motivated in part by adoption practice and life story work, where maintaining connections across birth family, foster carers, and adoptive family is central to a child’s developing sense of identity. The design deliberately avoids commercial cloud platforms in favour of a locally owned, privacy-preserving archive that can gradually become the child’s own. Key design principles include coherence, playfulness, self-direction, and the use of comprehensible physical structures that scaffold storytelling without adult mediation.