Throughout Paul Pangaro’s course: History and Future of Interaction Design, we were given several historical interaction design pieces, and asked to design something inspired by it for the future. The first item of interaction design history we looked at was Vannavar Bush’s Memex (which stood for Memory Expander), a personal device with the approximate form of a table that basically held all of one’s media or communications throughout their lives, and was mechanized in a way so that it would be extremely quick to sort through. (Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex)
Memex actually inspired another notable invention in HCI history: hypertext. (Which then, is what heavily inspired the creation of the world wide web as we know it, by the way. Cool, huh.) Key to the Memex machine was that users could add “associative trails” to connect items, linking related items together in a non-linear way. This is essentially what hypertext is, as well as how we search on the web, through links that open up new pages which then will have more links.
Another part about Memex that’s specifically intriguing to me is how personal it is. On the high level, it was a way to augment human intellect (as is all HCI development that followed), but specifically, Bush was interested in supplementing one’s personal memory.
I pursued a project that fulfilled my interest in better understanding the human goal of supplementing memory, through designing an interface that refines our searches. In Bush fashion, I also wanted to explore a physical form that was more of a speculative design and afforded more storytelling and provocation than it did ready-to-market technology. Considering the 2-week time frame for this project, I also chose to focus on the specific pain point of searching for things that we can’t remember.
I wanted to help with this painful problem: How can we search for something when we don’t know what we’re looking for? For example, when you’re at a loss for a specific vocabulary word. Or when there’s an image in your head but you don’t know the specific term to search up to find it to share.
Memcall: the Memory Caller
Our search for things often starts with associations and our memories, but often, our memories are wrong (although our goals aren’t). A limitation of our current technologies for searching (search engines, image searching) is that we as users don’t always know how to make “good” searches. This is because our associations and memories of things we don’t yet know is different from the associations of a computer which already knows. Therefore, I share a curiosity that is no way novel — how can we help computers think more like humans, so that they can help us think better? I want to look specifically at the current state of our searching technologies, including AI tools such as image searches.
I reimagined the “search” experience to be a non-linear multi-axis experience, compared to our current interactions of scrolling, opening hyperlinks, and traveling between webpages at a time. I designed a tangible search interface with a palm-sized ball that a user can roll around to explore related items and continue searching down the right direction, very very quickly (I think of it like the scroll wheel on a mouse). This form affords a rapid feedback loop (hello, cybernetics), which seamlessly moves users closer to their intentions. I also chose to demonstrate my tangible interface with sand under the ball, adding tactile, audio, and visual feedback — the visual feedback of a trail also representing Bush’s original concept of associative trails.
This project was inspired by a very very special moment in my life. When I was studying abroad in Korea fall of my junior year of college, I stumbled upon an embroidered pillow in a cafe with a design that I hadn’t seen in over a decade. It was of a pair of girls in hats together picking at flowers or holding a bouquet. They’re designed in these signature shapes and have a very distinguished form. When I was in early elementary school, I would routinely visit my next door neighbor, who was this kind elderly Dutch woman, and she would teach me how to bake madeleines (the key is use a lot of lemon!), and how to sew, quilt, and embroider. A motif in our embroidery was this exact Dutch girl in a hat, and she would pull out her archived embroidery patterns of them — fabric patterns that were very likely the last of their kind. She had passed away in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic and her house and all her belongings were immediately sold, and I’d never gotten the chance to say goodbye. But I still carry those same fundamental fabric arts skills with me, actually continuining a practice of experimental computational embroidery at CMU. I also still carried that memory of the Dutch girl motif.
Before I found my own embroidered potholder, I remember for years prior, occasionally trying to put in a Google search to find who this girl was. I only had a fuzzy image in my mind, and it was impossible to translate into the words a search engine would want to find me the right answer.
Only upon reverse image searching that pillow in Google, had I found her: Sunbonnet Sue. Turns out, she even has a little boyfriend, Overall Sam.
Without that image of that pillow, and the state of Google reverse image search, I may have never been able to find Sunbonnet Sue. She would’ve remained an image in my mind, that slightly changed every time I tried to remember her again. It is such a deeply human desire to maintain our memories, and there are so so many things that we crave so dearly to never forget. What about those in the in-between? Those memories that you know nothing about other than that they were real and that they matter.
