final project proposal

Path Diary - Final project proposal

Design Questions
# Experience 01
My friends and I went to SoHo to eat dinner. I wanted to find the Malaysian restaurant where I had a dinner with other friends, but I couldn’t remember the name and place of the restaurant. I just remembered the atmosphere and dubious direction of the location. Finally, we were obliged to choose another restaurant to eat dinner.
# Experience 02
My mother always loses her house key in our house. She tries to designate a place to put the key, but every time she is met with failure.

Everyday people encounter lots of events. Although there are several unpleasant feeling memories, people want to remember numerous things from a small house key to a favorite restaurant. However, our brain is limited in saving entire people’s life experience.
How can we save whole our life experience somewhere and take it out when we need it?

Background
"We remember instants, not days."
- Cesare Pavese

The function of the human brain gradually declines beginning at thirty years old and this phenomenon gives rise to temporary memory loss. In spite of losing memories with age, humans still remember a lot of information in our brain. Humans need to save new information in the brain, but there is a limitation to how much memory there is. So, if the brain saves new memory, the brain loses saved memory. For preventing this phenomenon, the brain occasionally fails to find information. In other words, the memory is saved in some specific location in our brain, but can’t be taken out because the brain cell forgets the location or can not arrange the information. This is a very natural phenomenon for humans. However, sometimes people are frustrated, and even feel psychological pain from this memory loss.

"Place is a special kind of object. It is a concretion of value, though not a valued thing that can be handled or carried about easily; it is an object in which one can dwell. Space, is given by the ability to move. Movements are often directed toward, or repulsed by, objects and places. Hence space can be variously experienced as the relative location of objects or places, as the distances and expanses that separate or link places, and - more abstractly - as the area defined by a network of places"
Yi-Fu Tuan - "Space and Place, the Perspective of experience" – 1977

In daily experiences, people go through some space and we remember the place (location) of the space. Space brings about our experiences, and their experiences stored some place in our brain as memory. When people recall the experience, they search the memory of experience among many places in our brain. Then, the memory of a place changes to the experience of the space. People differ in their awareness of space and time in the way they elaborate a space-time world. So, even though people are in the same space, they remember different experiences about that place.

“The interesting thing about idea spaces and memory systems is that they presuppose the existence of some sort of place, either real or graphic, which has its own structure and architecture. There is always a whole space, which already exists in its entirety, onto which ideas and images can be mapped, using only that portion of the space needed.”
Bill Viola-“Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space?” – 1982

Our memory of experiences is saved in an already fixed space in our brain. People lose or can’t recall their memory because they can’t find the path of the fixed space in their brain. However, if some clues of an incident are given, people recall their experience. To recall a memory or an experience, people write a diary or a note. It can be a personal history of everyday life and a map of the place where people store experiences in their brain.

Goal
Everyday, people are worried about remembering tiny things or places. If people can record and save their life experience with another alternative place, ‘storage devices’, people recall that memory more easily and reuse it again. This project would make it easier to remember our daily experiences. It is not only useful to people who are apt to forget, but also helpful for memorizing our life experiences.

Target User
1. Primary User
- The person who get stressed remembering everyday life who is over 30’s
2. Secondary User
- The person who has a bad sense of direction
- The person who wants to memorize a specific experience during travel
- The old person that experiences dementia

Success Measure
Can people record their experience easily?
Can people recall the memory of experience when they need to recall it?

Procedure
1. Define purpose of the project
- decide the goal of the project
- fix the project schedule
2. Find detail design problems
- interview with more than participants
3. Research conventional tools for memory
- investigate specific functions of the tools
4. Design scenarios
- define the target users
- design the specific tasks within context
- build up scenarios
5. Develop prototypes
- develop low-fidelity prototype
6. 1st Test prototypes
- test with more than 5 participants
7. Develop prototypes
- develop hi-fidelity prototype
8. 2nd Test prototypes
- test with more than 5 participants
9. Report

Schedule

References
Yi-Fu Tuan - "Space and Place, the Perspective of experience" – 1977
Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort editors, The New Media Reader – 2003
What exactly is amesia?, http://science.howstuffworks.com/question672.htm
Women and Alzheimer's Disease , http://www.nymemory.org/menmemandmoo.html