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Method of Loci – Places the items you want to remember in a visualized room or route that is familiar and items get “picked up” as you mentally walk through the room or route. The Unseen was a project that attempted to expand this kind of mnemonic device into digital information retrieval, externalising the loci into real world. After the invention of printing press, mnemonic devices such as the method of Loci began to lose their importance, as records and stories were to be written down, and could be mediated over generations. The whole point of linking information to real space, of course, is easy recollection where no external memory aids are available. Why then externalise memory place into a computer? On top of storing information, digital processing enables dynamic changing of the data, hence giving the possibility to recollect something that did not exist before. In this sense, one can hardly speak of memory anymore, and the question is more about information retrieval. The sheer amount of information, however, is beginning to require increasingly much mental effort to get to the information one is looking for, and in this context, providing memory aids that unload part of the effort into our natural way of perceiving the world, can be advantageous. From a technological point of view, Unseen addresses the problem of displaying information in "human scale". Especially in portable domain, the sizes of the displays are often very small, and displaying graphic or spatial information is difficult. In terms
of usability, navigating large visual databases is many times very cumbersome,
and requires fair amount of training in order to being able to use to
system optimally. Hence intuitiveness and ease of use was also at the
forefront. |
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