Emma Whiteside was involved with Victoria University’s Design Led Futures program in 2009. Emma was involved in a collaboration of seven students to create a group called Puf. The Puf project is a direct response to the challenge to “step back from the constraints of daily practice, to look beyond the immediate product, to look at it in context, and to investigate the broader issues that surround it – human issues, issues of society, culture and behaviour –including emotional issues that are fundamental to design as a discipline”.

Emma’s individual research within the Puf project looked at how memories could be preserved, to be accessed in a virtual world. The above imagery shows her father standing on Queen St, Auckland at a parade to celebrate the end of WW2. The idea that sparked this research was the ability to be able to put herself into that situation at the same age with her dad to see what that experience was like…something that could be possible in the future virtual world.

Puf’s theories on Memory:
By 2070, humankind will be capable of capturing the knowledge and consciousness of every human being. When death of our conscious being succumbs us, our ‘core essence’ is saved and stored in the virtual realm as a resource for the living. We will continue to have the opportunity to call upon the knowledge and wisdom of our loved ones or anyone else that may be knowledgeable in our areas of interest, even after they have passed on from our physical and virtual worlds.

In the future, we will not lose our physical objects and artefacts. In 2070 our memories will be able to manifest themselves into objects. A scratch on a tool will not only physically tell us it has been damaged, but we will be able to experience the moment in which the scratch was created. By reading the scratch, we are taken back in time to the point it was created. These embedded memories contain a multi-layered range of information, including the ability to convey and replicate the sensory information (sight, sound, touch, taste and smell) of the event in question. The mimetic survival of mankind will exist in objects they interacted with during their life.

Links:
Puf’s first concept of how we will extend our life (Hybercoon’s).
Puf’s final concept of how we will extend our life (BUD’s).
Puf’s final report.
News and media on the Design Led Futures program.