Design Process

How can personal location history archives be meaningfully experienced as they grow to unprecedented scales? What opportunities exist to support reflective, ongoing experiences that use this data for everyday reminiscence on past places and activities? Memory Tracer is a household object that occasionally, yet indefinitely surfaces locational moments from a person’s past, making them available to be re-experienced while subtly indicating how deep in the past they are coming from.

Early on, we desired to create a design that expressed a continual and gradual reveal of a location over time. We believed such a slow reveal could help build anticipation wile expressing something significant about a location as it gradually emerged and became more legible.

We found that cropping the corners of the LED matrix to creating a more circular display offered a more organic, unobtrusive aesthetic — something that could be lived with in one’s life over a long time period. This design decision made the light look more like a portal that could be looked into, which achieved the quality of inviting peering into.

We appreciated the aesthetic and weight of cement as a durable material that lasts over time, yet passing light through it was a problem. Eventually, we developed a novel technique of embedding fiber optics in cement to better channel and express the light through the cement monolith-like form.

Through numerous iterations in form and materials, we arrived at the final version of Memory Tracer which is hand cast in rockite using a custom designed silicon mold.

Interaction Design

Reflecting on how Memory Tracer's pacing could express time inspired us to align the number of days it takes for a memory to reveal with the number of years in the past that memory occurred. We also decided to not just reveal a single moment, but instead reveal the entire location day. Then when interacting with the device, it would show where we had been, at the current clock time. For example, If we looked at Memory Tracer at 7:05pm on June 21, 2022 it would show where we had been at 7:05pm on June 21, 2015 (visualized by the small red dot).

Outcomes & Implications

Memory Tracer illustrates how the design quality of pre-interaction can be mobilized not only through subtle, gradual changes in the design artifact’s output (e.g., light-based visual changes) but also through leveraging the pacing itself as a form of shifting temporal expression. These qualities can come together to prime experiences of reminiscence on past experiences bound to places that continually recur and diverge across the calendar year, and which subtly expand as the location history archive and user age over time.

As a design case, Memory Tracer demonstrates how enabling people to cede autonomy to explicitly slow systems can make time for pause and reflection through uncontrollable, gradually changing expressions of their personal location histories.