FMP - Desk research

Research question

I had quite a few tutorials with different tutors, and I want to narrow down the direction by clarifying the users and the memories. I thought about taxi drivers with a good memory of city map, or people working with archives, or holiday memories, before I finally found I was more interested in exploring memory and space. For one, digital technologies like photos and videos cannot record our sense of space. For another, I am interested in how people remember a place when they think about it. Would they remember the size, the sound, the temperature, or other elements?

On the other hand, smartphones and other wearable devices can capture personal memories conveniently in the forms of photos, videos, recordings and etc. Moreover, these devices have nearly unlimited storage space to record our experiences continuously. However, these digital technologies are gradually shaping the way how our brains work to remember things. We are now used to sorting out our memories as texts, photos, videos and other data forms, but our brains are working in a far more complicated and interesting way.

Thus, these together brought up my research question:

• How can people record and experience space-related memories digitally?

Here, “memory” refers to students’ school memories in particular, because schools have the most typical shared spaces where different memories occur, and school memories are often what people value a lot. The “space”, accordingly, refers to indoor spaces inside schools, such as classrooms or studios. “Space-related” means memories generated in specific spaces.

Desk research

Literature review

I first looked into how digital technologies affect the way of natural remembering and recalling in two parts, (a) recording and experiencing digitally and (b) technology-mediated memory vs organic memory. Then I studied the mutual relationship between space and memory.

This part will be explained in detail in the essay, so I did not include it here.

Practice review

There are varied digital memory recording and reviewing systems, including:

• "Rewind", a system automatically recording ‘a sequence of street-level images’ during excursions to recall people’s daily memories.

• "Pensieve", to augment people’s episodic memories and sharing memory cues to others.

• "A-me", a physical repository for memories, and users can reveal private memories by pointing at specific areas of the brain apparatus.

• "GeoLapse", a ‘digital time capsule’ introducing serendipity experience, and users do not know when or where a message is.

• "DadBot", turning his dying father Into AI.

• "Memory Palace", a 18-metre-wide sculpture carved from bamboo and set within a mirrored box-room.

Dadbot by James Vlahos

"Memory Palace" by Es Devlin inside Sir John Soane’s Pitzhanger Gallery

Most of the projects are exploring technologies of capturing and translating data, while some of them also supports users' emotional needs, such as GeoLpase and DadBot. From the above I learned that users should be able to edit and decide the memories initiatively, and it is better to get users emotionally involved.

My project is more focusing on the emotional need of users. Based on the knowledge, I then started my field research to understand how human brains remember a same shared space differently in a qualitative way.