From Materialising to Memories: Design research to support personal remembering

Perhaps the term computer 'memory' has led people to believe that human memory has to be perfect and infallible. Many people worry when they realise they forget and some turn to recording and collecting as much as they can, e.g. photos or videos through life logging or personal data as seen in the quantified-self trend. Some people assume that by collecting they can avoid forgetting or at least have access to the information anytime later. And that is where they are wrong. First of all, recordings are not equivalent to memories, and memories 'can not be stored'. Secondly it has already been shown that people collect too much and organize too little for them to be able to find information later [1]. Thirdly, human memory works best when we forget... a lot.

What I want to talk about is my vision [2] that we can use design research to support human remembering by supporting our memory's functions [3], which include a directive function (using the past to guide present and future thoughts and behaviours, e.g. solving problems), a self-representative function (creating a sense of self over time) and a social function (developing and nurturing relationships, through sharing of personal experiences). It is important to realise that in order to support these functions there is no need to improve our remembering capabilities, however it could benefit from the right type of support. Since remembering is a reconstructive process, individual memories are subject to change, continuously, and what someone experiences as a memory does not have to be the same as what happened or what other people remember from the experience.

Bits of information from the original experience can be used to stimulate and facilitate the reconstruction process. These so-called memory cues [4], which can be anything: from a photo, a song to a person or a location, are at the core of our research. We use a people-centred approach to study memory cues in everyday life, which informs the design of interactive systems that present these memory cues. Since these cues are often digital, while people prefer material objects [e.g. 5], we combine material and digital in our studies and designs.