The “Memory Space” and “The Conference”: Exploring Future Uses of Web2.0 and Mobile Internet through Design Interventions

New digital media offers use many opportunities to record, organise and review our activities, communications and thoughts. Much of this activity is conceived of in terms of ‘real-time’ communication, or abstract, disembodied information access. However, we propose that Web2.0 and personal mobile media are having important implications for collective memory practices. We need to understand how this is happening, and how ICT can design to support memory practices within the context of particular of communities and localities. This paper explores experiments with a ‘Memory Space’, concentrating on imagining the future of The Conference, and building and testing a tool to make
the intense, and multilayered experience of conferences more productive and reorienting. It particularly taps in to the use of place and space as key elements in producing and linking to memories of encounters and ideas. It suggests new
ways to record and access informal conversations and encounters using mobile messaging, social networking, text, images, voice and video, and linking these with the formal and informal physical spaces of conferences using the web,
GPS, and mobile phone interfaces, creating a much richer record of a conference than formal Proceedings and private memories.