Living Memory is a project founded by the European Commission which addresses the research domain if Intelligent Information Interfaces (i3).
The programme for i3 is aimed at the broad population, and seeks to create novel interaction paradigms for interacting with information.

Living Memory will provide members of a selected community who live and work in a particular locality or neighbourhood with a means to capture, share and explore their collective memory with the aim to interpret and preserve the richness and complexity of local culture.

Living Memory - Description

Living Memory will create concepts to support the communication of local history, local news and the sharing of personal experiences and memory in multiple media, accessible via innovative, intuitive interfaces that are integrated in people's homes or in public space.

The research proposes to use the specific content created by the community as the driver for the creation of interfaces: in other words, our premise is that a user interface for a 'content-based service' should reflect the particular typologies of content which the service contains. We refer to aspects such as the representation of social structures and the local culture, and to characteristics of the narrative structures and media currently applied in personal and public content.

The analysis of the content will generate initial user interface paradigms. We see a role for intelligent agents in the process of marking significant events and public discourse, on the basis of, for example, the analysis of user interest in particular content. Over a period of time this then represents the potential creation of 'memory' for the community.

Active involvement of community members throughout the entire research trajectory will ensure the development of relevant and meaningful interfaces for content creation, communication and preservation that prove to be usable and attractive for the community members. The community involved are people who live, work or meet in a particular area in Edinburgh, UK.

Deliverables from the project include visionary concept renderings aiming 5 - 10 years ahead from now, a working prototype system illustrating the user interface to a collective memory that has been built up during the project life by the community involved in the research, guidelines for the creation of user interfaces for content-based services, along with methodologies for the intelligent handling of memory through the application of agent technology.