Informing Customers by Means of Digital Product Memories

The continuous collection of digital information via smart labels attached to physical objects is a promising way to support information availability across all stages of a product's lifecycle. Since such "digital product memories" may contain a vast amount of heterogeneous data, we expect a strong demand for user support in tasks related to information retrieval and discovery. In this article, we focus on the interaction between consumers and digital product memories in a retail scenario. On the basis of several prototype implementations, we summarize various ways of retrieving and presenting product-related information with the goal to shed some light upon aspects of relevance for the interaction between users and object memories in general.