Grains of Memory: User Experience in the SandBox Interactive Installation

Abstract

Departing from oral recollections we performed about the sea, we have developed the Sea Grains interactive installation series “SandBox” as a poetic instrument to research how a corpus of memories can be contextualized through digital art to illustrate the identity, emotional and social practices of people with the sea. The installation plays back the collected oral recordings to the participants as they playfully interact with a sandbox, stimulating multiple senses to evoke memories. The conceptualization involved cultural studies, oral history, and neuroscience. Through a series of public exhibitions, we have field-tested and iterated the installation, which progressively became more immersive‘ to better achieve the proposed goals. Our account can help inform artists and User Experience (UI) practitioners exploring and integrating memory into digital media artifacts.