Supporting embodied remembering through interactive designs
Doctor of Philosophy thesis
Exertion Games Lab, Monash University
June 2022-October 2026
Remembering is an important part of our everyday lives: we remember plans, so we do not forget that important meeting; we remember to get the one item from the shop; we remember our past experience playing a sport and use that to improve our technique. Altogether, remembering is important for our independence, our sense of self, and our wellbeing.
We use many different strategies to support our remembering: we use (digital) calendars to remind us of birthdays and dentist appointments, or use photos to reminisce about a vacation we took five years ago. In human-centred computing, many different technologies have been proposed to support remembering. Most of these technologies offer remembering support by offering images, videos, music, text or spoken words. However, remembering is a process that involves the entire body. For example, we might pretend to eat a hamburger to remember what to get from the store. This raised the question: how do we create interactive designs that support embodied remembering?
I explored this question in my PhD research by starting with understanding how we use bodily movements in our everyday remembering in the form of the Embodied Remembering Experience (ERX) model, and how designers could use this understanding when designing new remembering support technologies. Additionally, I iteratively designed three technologies that use bodily movements to support remembering in different ways. From participants who used these prototypes, we learned that wearable technologies can help with remembering by drawing attention to the body. The participants used this attention to reflect on past and present movements and activities, which, in turn, helped with remembering. Ultimately, the ERX model and the three technologies led to the creation of the Design for Embodied Remembering (D4ER) framework. Altogether, the research I present in my thesis offers a starting point for future memory systems that support remembering through and with our bodies.
Video teaser for the paper “Towards Designing for Everyday Embodied Remembering: Findings From a Diary Study”, which was presented at DIS in 2023.
Outcomes
Technologies can offer remembering support by inviting users to direct their attention to their body. This is possible as part of different remembering activities, such as practicing a skill, remembering plans or remembering past experiences. How much and in what way this attention is invited differs per activity. For example, when remembering the next steps in a choreography, attention is mostly invited by drawing gentle attention to the body, without interrupting ongoing movements. On the other hand, when the user is remembering the size of a planter by imitating holding it, a device like an exoskeleton might offer the user guidance in finding the exact measurement by spacing their hands at the actual distance.
Although this project is now concluded, there is still enough to explore within design for embodied remembering. First of all, the studies included in this PhD only focused on a single person experiencing remembering. Yet, remembering plays an important role in social interactions. For example, we remember shared or personal experience as a way to bond. Bodily movements play an important part here too, in the form of body language and gestures that guides the shared remembering experience. Technologies could help us experience bodily movements that the other person makes, even when they are not physically present, which could support us in remembering. Additionally, when we use bodily movements while we are remembering, we often use objects: we place our keys on our lunchbox to make sure we bring it, or use photos to reminiscence on past holidays and celebrations. Retracing past interactions with objects could open up new ways in which we use these objects in remembering.
Finally, the work produced in this PhD did not focus on memory performance, but on remembering experiences. Future work could explore how the technologies that were explored within this PhD impact memory performance.
Publications related to this project
Overdevest, N., Patibanda, R., Saini, A., Van den Hoven, E., & Mueller, F. (2023). Towards Designing for Everyday Embodied Remembering: Findings from a Diary Study. Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference, 2611–2624. https://doi.org/10.1145/3563657.3595999
Overdevest, N., Patibanda, R., Saini, A., Van den Hoven, E., & Mueller, F. (2024). GazeAway: Designing for Gaze Aversion Experiences. Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613905.3650771