MY_ND

MY_ND

Fantasy is Reality Interfaces for Hanging in There BAUHAUS-UNIVERSITY WEIMAR

TABLE OF CONTENT PROJECT ABSTRACT MIND/MEMORY PALACE REALITY & FUTURE PERCEPTION SCIENTIFIC PHENOMENA FUTURE SPECULATION INTERFACE PROTOTYPE SOURCES

DEFNE ISIKL

SOSE 2021

BAUHAUS WEIMAR UNIVERSITY

FANTASY IS REALITY INTERFACES FOR HANGING IN THERE

DEFNE ISIKL

PROJECT ABSTRACT Memories are one of the most valuable possessions of humans; memories are what make humans themselves. Humans remember good and bad and forget good and bad.

“Remembering” and “forgetting” are still remaining as unknown mysteries for humankind.

Even though the neurological explanations have promising attempts to put the light on their functioning, the ultimate answer is yet to be explored. Therefore, these manners arouse a lot of interest and open to great future development and speculation.

Since ancient times back in Greece, people have mentally combined vision of a physical space they well know with the memories. The aim of such methods was to design “mind/ memory palaces” where “the remembering” can be kept safely and be reached in the future with its adequate details. Hence, one can spatialize knowledge through building their own mind places and retrieve memories. One can remember all his/her own memories with details through visualizing a walk within virtual space and reading symbolic memories. This method is also depicted as Method of Loci, (Loci = places in Latin) a strategical memory enhancement which makes use of visualizing of familiar spatial environments where intimate memories are embedded.

In order to articulate a future scenario, it is important to observe the existing knowledge on memory and its related context. Memory as a matter, is a concept which has been biologically and psychologically researched.

MY_NP poses a desirable future on how humans can archive personal memory by taking into account a lot of parameters. Human senses are the essential elements to develop or enhance future of memory collection. Within the futures’ cone, what seemed plausible was developed within the project. Which seems as a design fiction, could be the reality of near future due to enormous pace of technology.

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In current world where knowledge become widely reachable, human brain cannot compete or keep up with available huge amount open source data and fades its ability to remember. Dependency on technology narrowed the unlimited imaginative capacity of human minds where in the near future, they will also start to forget the things that are the most crucial, let along their “memories”. This would be an undeniable truth of future since smart technologies are becoming an extension of the human body which covers all the brain functionalities. That is the reason why, in order to keep up the pace with technology without losing human capabilities, “mind palaces” are/will be essential to further civilization

development.

The project aims to build an intimate mind palace digital personal archive) to its users.

By encrypting the memory data, which are embedded in sensory files, one can safely store and access anytime his/her own memories. By designing an immersive concept of memory palace and by accessing it thought web-based archive, “memory” can not be only as an event happened in the past but as a vivid and growing diary of important events happened on someone’s life engraved in what means to them.

BAUHAUS WEIMAR UNIVERSITY

FANTASY IS REALITY: INTERFACES FOR HANGING IN THERE

With the enhancement which are designed to be established by sensory gears, humans will evolve to a better and superior version of themselves: someone who can fully perceive him/herself and its surroundings. By collection all the sensory data, technology could be future proof and designed in a way to ensure to capture memories. These memories will be kept safe at utmost discretion and enable an infinite life for its users by making the memories accessible to anyone with the knowledge of the right mnemonic keys.

Having a speculative approach combined with sensory enhancement elements to memory palace, one can store, access, recall, re-live and re-experience; dream to a better tomorrow.

Figma Board Link: https://www.figma.com/file/JWxnjdhvdF5XWchaTBa5mh/MY_ND?nodeid=0%3A1 Figma Animation Prototype: https://www.figma.com/proto/JWxnjdhvdF5XWchaTBa5mh/ MY_ND?node-id=12179%3A4121&scaling=min-zoom&page-id=0%3A1&starting-pointnode-id=12179%3A4121

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DEFNE ISIKL

MIND/MEMORY PALACE

REALITY & FUTURE PERCEPTION

Mind/ Memory Palace concept is very old

Perception and reality has been discussion topi for neurologist, psychologists and philosophers over the last centuries. What do we as humans perceive is different than the “reality” itself. Perception is related to senses, cultural background, past experiences, ideology and a lot of other factors. What is important is that, human brain shapes the reality. Mind has a power to contruct new realities on top of the perceived world. Thus, this affects the construction of memories.

method which dates back to Ancient Greek.

Basically, it is a technique that made use of the strength of human brain and its spaital understanding in order to record and retreive memories. Therefore, memory palaces can be considered as embodiments. One can easily remember his/her own memories through visualizing a walk in a desired space; within this space symbolic renderings of memories are embedded.

Memory Palace provides its owners an infinite way of archiving, storing thei rpersonal history with extraordinary details. This techniques is also referred as “method of loci(loci being Latin for Places)”. It is a memory enhancement strategy, which utilizes already-known spaces or places, aiming to enhance the recalling of information.

“In this technique the subject memorizes the layout of some building, or the arrangement of shops on a street, or any geographical entity which is composed of a number of discrete loci. When desiring to remember a set of items the subject ‘walks’ through these loci in their imagination and commits an item to each one by forming an image between the item and any feature of that locus. Retrieval of items is achieved by ‘walking’ through the loci, allowing the latter to activate the desired items.

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“Additionally, instead of spaces, some artworks such as paintings were used as memory palaces through time. People can encode their memories to a very well-known artwork on their choosing. This means that, mind palaces can function without also being a spatial loci.

“In the 1500s, an Italian scholar and philosopher named Giulio Camillo conceived of an arguably outrageous plan to facilitate the memorization of all the knowledge in the world.”

“The theatre itself refers to mnemonic techniques called “The art of memory,” a series of methods allowing better memorization of information through the association of mental places to information, or, through the spatialization of memory into ideal places.”

Giulio Camillo takes it a further step by imagining an actual materialization of human memory and extending it to collective knowledge, making the theatre a sort of ancestor of the encyclopaedia or even of the Internet.

“Most of the time, the story our brains generate matches the real, physical world — but not always. Our brains also unconsciously bend our perception of reality to meet our desires or expectations.

And they fill in gaps using our past experiences.”

fascinating diagram in his presentation to illustrate different kinds of potential futures.It consisted of a number of cones fanning out from the present into the future. Each cone represented different levels of likelihood.”

In my point of view, where future can be speculated, it is also important to see the mind as a key element to speculation.

That’s the reason why seeing the Map of Reality (my interpretation also inspired by Plato’s Cave Allegory) with Futures Cone provided me to focus on “the Map of Unreality”; speculative aspect of the limits of mind and its perception capabilites.

BAUHAUS WEIMAR UNIVERSITY

FANTASY IS REALITY: INTERFACES FOR HANGING IN THERE

On the other hand, Futures Cone is a digram which maps future scenarios: “In 2009, the futurologist Stuart Candy visited the Design Interactions program at the Royal College of Art and used a

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DEFNE ISIKL

SCIENTIFIC PHENOMENA

FUTURE SPECULATION

“Remembering” and “forgetting” are in relation with memory through biology. In terms of scientific approach, why and how we remember/forget things are still not 100% explained. There are some different research by the professionals which point out different perspectives or clarifying some concepts.

The dependency of the tehcnology has increased enourmously and by evolving into post-humans, it will increase more and more. with this depency, there are some setbacks as well.

Biologically, memories are related to the transmission between neurons. Stronger the connection, stronger the memory. Neurons send messages to one another across narrow gaps called synapses, where memory is also transmitted. According to some scientists, in order to have long-term memories, they should be built on top of synapses. The forgetting curve changes whether the memory is wellstored (consolidated) or not.

The link between senses and memory is undeniably important. They have an important role to trigger the memory construction process.

However, it is also clear that human sensory mechanisms are not perfect: we can perceive only a small amount of reality. And therefore, we can only create memoroes from that amount.

The flow of memory construction is full of obstacles: it has a huge dependency on sensory perception and there is no guarantee that each experience we had in our life will

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turn into (consolidated) long-term memories.

Additionally, the retrieval process can be hard for older people, even though they had longterm memories well-stored.

All these shows a lot of great information to form a system to enhance and digitalize this flow of memory.

With smart phones, humans have become less smart; you have your phone to keep track and to search for anything you want, anytime. With all these great advancements, we started to use less of our brain to remember things. We have digital archives in our devices, where we can store data and from where we can reach an unlimitless amount of knowledge: Internet.

brains to act. Therefore, all we will have are vague memories; broken memories due to forgetting curve due and non-functioning neurotransmitters.

BAUHAUS WEIMAR UNIVERSITY

FANTASY IS REALITY: INTERFACES FOR HANGING IN THERE

With every information being so reacheable each moment, we forgot the value of knowledge. Indeed, it is important to be able to reach information, but didn’t we take it for granted?

Memorization fades. Memories fades. We don’t need to fully live the moment; we can always see the photo of the moment afterwards,right?

We are an exposed society. We are exposed to information with our empty and untrained minds.

In the future, we will reach to a moment that human brain will not be able to completely retrieve, encode or consolidate memories because we will forget how to train our

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INTERFACE

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PROTOTYPE

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FANTASY IS REALITY: INTERFACES FOR HANGING IN THERE

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SOURCES https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci https://magazine.art21.org/2012/08/30/the-museum-as-memory-palace/#.YSlPPY4zaUk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_of_memory https://memorypalacewalks.wordpress.com/memorypalace/ Virtual memory palaces: immersion aids recall: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/ s10055-018-0346-3 https://deepstash.com/idea/8229/mnemonic-peg-system https://deepstash.com/idea/8227/memory-palace-the-method-of-loci https://artofmemory.com/wiki/How_to_Build_a_Memory_Palace https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/technology/21brain.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 https://www.researchgate.net/post/Has-our-capacity-to-remember-been-reduced-overas-a-result-of-technology-usage https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-our-brains-make-memories-14466850/ http://socks-studio.com/2019/03/03/spatializing-knowledge-giulio-camillos-theatre-of-memory-1519-1544/ https://www.nature.com/articles/news040524-12 https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/reality-constructed-your-brain-here-s-whatmeans-and-why-it-matters https://wp.unil.ch/discoverunil/2016/11/using-multiple-senses-to-improve-memory/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting_curve https://brainconnection.brainhq.com/2013/03/12/how-we-remember-and-why-we-forget/#:~:text=At%20the%20most%20basic%20level,like%20mountains%20reflect%20geologic%20eras.

BAUHAUS WEIMAR UNIVERSITY

FANTASY IS REALITY: INTERFACES FOR HANGING IN THERE

SPECULATIVE EVERYTHING, ANTHONY DUNNE & FIONA RABY, MIT PRESS

https://worldofweirdthings.com/2010/10/06/taking-cyborg-technology-to-the-next-level Figma, Blush plugin for Figma(for illustrations Free 3d low poly men model for Blender Blender Magic Pose App

PROJECT ABSTRACT DRAFT

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