I’ve been experimenting with a wearable camera called Narrative Clip as a way of conducting ethnography. The camera is about an inch square and simply clips on to whatever you’re wearing. The camera then automatically takes a photo every 30 seconds. I’ve put some of the outputs from the camera on a demo site called N = One.
I was worried that wearing a camera that was taking photographs all the time would be an invasion of people’s privacy and that I would upset someone or get punched in the face or possibly Tasered like my Google Glass-wearing peers. But that wasn’t the case. Nobody cared. I did, however, learn a few things:
Most people don’t even notice the camera. When they do, they ask what it’s about. I explain that I’m recording my life and it automatically takes a photograph every 30 seconds. Nobody was upset. No questions about privacy. I think this is because people blame the machine, not you. With the Narrative Clip, the photograph is partly the responsibility of the device—it fires every 30 seconds whether you want it to or not. With Google Glass, you have to tell it to take a photograph, making it entirely your choice. This seems to make a difference in how people perceive the device.
You also forget you’re wearing it, which requires some self-training. Forgetting is fine most of the time, but not when you throw your jacket across the room with the camera still attached, or wander into a bathroom.
The Narrative Clip captures gigabytes of photos a day—way too many to care about. The camera works best when you wear it for a particular event like a party or a shopping trip. Just not in the dark; the low-light pictures are terrible.
The Narrative Clip makes a Gordon Bell-like recording of a life accessible to anyone willing to clip a small camera to their shirt. Whether that’s useful probably depends on having a specific question you want to answer about your own behavior—otherwise you’re just accumulating gigabytes of yourself eating lunch.