What if interactive systems could remember, if only for a short time?

Procedural Interaction

On a recent trip, I visited an old church. Like many churches, memorial stones of various sizes had been set into the stone floor over the last 500 years. So many stones that the parishioners had abandoned the search for me floor space and began placing them on the walls and pillars. To view the stones and honor the memories of the dead, you must to walk on them, over them. Walking on them wears the stones over time, and the inscriptions are lost; the slow deterioration of the stone embodies the memory of the objects.

A Call for Real Interaction

As baseline functionality of interactive systems reaches what I consider adequate development, the wholesale disregard for shared experience and lack of user to user memory in interactive experience seems a missed opportunity. In addition, the glut of information on the web contributes to the seemingly accelerating rate of retention loss. While the internet may remember everything, we are overwhelmed with information, forcing us to divert our attention to the newest thing.

Through both additive and subtractive accumulation—fading and disappearance, clutter and obscured information—I hope to visualize the collective use of the web using a metaphor of decay and weathering, exploring the application of different memory types to add context to rich interactive experiences.