DigitalCraft Wiki:Future Memories
Group
Project Group
Pip Passchier & Leontien van Hattem
Starting Point
After the Memory Core Workshop this assignment started. The question was to create a medium, way or work about Future Memories. We immediately brainstormed about what memories are for us. The most strong way to remember something is smell. But pictures most of the time tell the biggest stories. By seeing an image from 10 by 15 cm, you can tell stories from way back, detailed en you can really go back to that moment. We find that fascinating. Will is also be able the other way around. That you start by the memory and that the photo will pop up in your head. We'd like to experiment this. Testing your memory.
But then, we began to run out of time. And we were not yet convinced by our own concept. So we started brainstormen again. We came up with the idea of vaccuum bags. Because that is a way to keep something very long lasting. Like you want memories to stay forever. We got stuck on this again, because we just forced ourself to think of something that we could put in the vacuum bags (like smell from important persons in our lives etc), but it was not really conceptual of well thought of.
That is where we made another switch. We asked ourself the question: where are the most of our memories right now? Answer: on Facebook. It sounds stupid, but is is such an easy way of collecting moments. Positive moments. Sometimes you just scroll down your own timeline and you get happy of all the moments you experienced. Although it felt confronting that Facebook has all our (positive) memories, it is the truth and that is why we decided to go on with this. And how dependent we are from our digital devices, like mobile phones, where we scroll down our time line a ton of times, we actually do not really carry it with us. Or we do not really have it around us. We felt that we can make a change here.
Design Research
Pip and I are both persons who are not very busy with our phone or other digital divices. Therefore we took a look at the world and people around us, in the public space. It was shocking how everyone looked down all the time, and did not even have notice of the small, funny and beautiful things that happened around them. We felt that we could make a difference here by capturing the 'little things in life', where everyone is so easy and silly about, but the actually no one sees it anymore.
We choose a typewriter and polaroid camera to capture this, because these two mediums are 'slow' nowadays which makes sure that you will be very busy with really looking at your surroundings before capturing it. This is in total contrast with how we use our camera and phone today, where we take 10 pictures of everything and write little messages without actual meaning sometimes.
Design Proces
Next step
From our findings we created a publication. A book full of poems and polaroid pictures. The ordinary daily life summed up in our own words. The reactions were very nice. People were surprises by our writing and did not even think about the things that we wrote down. In the end this was a very helpful way of researching, and a good starting point for this project. From here we came up with the idea to do something with the amount of typing that we do nowadays. Because we experienced that it takes a lot of time with the typewriter during our research, but actually we type the whole day long nowadays but it is designed so well now that you don't realize anymore that it is actually a action that might take some time.
And that is why we started to collect everything we type on one day in our phone. In Whatsapp. Because that is the app we both use the most. We collected this, and we wrote and typed it out. To feel again how much we actually write on one single day.
While doing this, we came up with an idea for the final design. We found it very interesting that typing goes so fast, and writing so slow, while actually you have the same result. Back in the old days the had nothing else than pen and paper, but now we are all used to the typing on our digital divices But what if typing will take the time that it does by handwriting. Then it is still the same action, but the time from the actual action. With this idea we want to make a statement. That we must not forget that almost everything digital and superfast nowadays is inspired on something from way back. And that we should not forget how precious this is. So that we should sometime think a little bit longer before we send just random messages. Because now the message is actually sometimes lost.
