Apps & Services: Q&A with Trigr creator Summer Bedard
by Jenny Chowdhury 
Find out more about what Trigr is, how it works and the thinking behind this new approach to moblogging.
A look at most anyone’s moblog will yield the same conclusion: moblogs are generally far removed from the actual lives that they’re intended to document.
Enter Trigr, a life streaming application that pushes users to capture ordinary moments in their daily routines. Once signed up for the service, Trigr sends randomly timed SMS messages to a user’s device with the text “shoot!” The user snaps a photo of whatever they happen to be doing at that moment and sends it to a Trigr email address, whereupon the photo posts to a Flickr page for all to see.
A look at Trigr’s companion Flickr account, which hosts about 1,500 photos from the 35 participants who took part in Trigr’s first trial, shows people engaged in numerous mundane activities. The photos reveal that people spent much of their time eating, sitting in front of their computers and commuting. But while these activities are commonplace, the method of documentation is captivating, providing candid views into people’s lives.
I saw photos of friends who participated making breakfast and working at their offices, activities I might never otherwise witness, and by doing so felt I got to know them more fully. I found strangers’ ordinary moments equally compelling: I excitedly viewed a shot of a man, whose photos told the story of him becoming a new dad, picking out socks for his new baby.
To find out more about the thinking behind Trigr, I sat down with Summer Bedard, who created it as her Master’s thesis project at NYU, to ask her about the roots of Trigr and where she’s planning to go with the project.
Full disclosure: we went to NYU together. What have you been up to since we graduated?
I work as a user experience designer for a company called Big Spaceship. I’ve also continued to work on my own projects. I’m most interested in using technology to create social experiments.
What was the motivation behind creating Trigr?
Voyeurism. Everyone’s Myspace and Facebook photos are all smoke and mirrors, I wanted to get a look at people’s real lives. With Trigr, I saw an opportunity to capture potentially important information that we don’t usually document.
What were your findings (in general and the most interesting ones)?
I saw that people found value in documenting and sharing ordinary moments of their lives. Users saw a reflection of their own habits and patterns, and socially, other people (sometimes strangers) got a sense of who they were through their photos. It was an interesting way to keep in touch with many people on a daily basis that didn’t take very much time. The most interesting finding was that everyone’s life has some sort of narrative, whether they realize it or not.
How does Trigr fit into moblogging culture?
It’s a way to participate, without feeling like you have to frame your life in some sort of narrative for others. A lot of times when you blog, or even update your “status” you feel pressure to be clever or tell a story. By sending the message “shoot!”, Trigr is essentially pinging you with the question of “What’s happening now?” Over time, the photo responses become a story.
Are there similar projects that you discovered when you were conducting your research for Trigr? What did you aim to improve upon in regard to these projects?
I found a lot of projects that ask people to document their days, or to take photos of ordinary moments. There are a ton of life streaming applications out there, like Twitter or Radar, that allow people to share these moments. What I didn’t find was an app that asked people to share their lives in moments that weren’t self selected; I thought this might be an interesting twist.
What would you do to improve upon the project?
I’d give participants more control over when they received the messages, allowing them to narrow and customize the window during which they could receive prompts.
In general what do you do with the photos you capture on your phone?
I post them to Flickr, and pray for comments.
What’s next for Trigr?
I want to explore what groups might benefit from synchronized documentation of a period of time or an event. Families, corporations, really any group of people interested in it. I’d like to run tests with different groups and see where the concept might be most useful.
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After the Q&A I was left with my own questions to ponder. While technology is now enabling us to record our highly personal narratives, do we really want to share them, and what does it mean for us to do so? Where do we draw the line between our private and public lives? And how do we decide who has access to them? I’ll test my own boundaries when I participate in Trigr’s next round of moblogging.
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