Photographs play a central role in many types of informal storytelling. This paper describes an easy-to-use device that enables digital photos to be used in a manner similar to print photos for sharing personal stories. A portable form factor combined with a novel interface supports local sharing like a conventional photo album as well as recording of stories that can be sent to distant friends and relatives. User tests validate the design and reveal that people alternate between “photo-driven” and “story-driven” strategies when telling stories about their photos.

A good software architecture facilitates application system development, promotes achievement of functional requirements, and supports system reconfiguration. We present a domain-specific software architecture (DSSA) that we have developed for a large application domain of adaptive intelligent systems (AISs). The DSSA provides: (a) an AIS reference architecture designed to meet the functional requirements shared by applications in this domain, (b) principles for decomposing expertise into highly reusable components, and (c) an application configuration method for selecting relevant components from a library and automatically configuring instances of those components in an instance of the architecture. The AIS reference architecture incorporates features of layered, pipe and filter, and blackboard style architectures. We describe three studies demonstrating the utility of our architecture in the subdomain of mobile office robots and identify software engineering principles embodied in the architecture.>