Re·Member is a practice-based design research thesis investigating what becomes possible for collective mourning when personal memory is designed not to be preserved, but to circulate.
The installation invites visitors to upload photographs associated with loss; images of people, places, or moments that no longer exist in the present tense. These photographs are printed through three Phomemo thermal printers connected to a Raspberry Pi on a local network, and placed on a wall of absence: a modular display built from Kappa board, where strangers may take a print and leave one in return. No names. No explanations. Only the quiet weight of what someone else has carried.
The work proposes that memory survives not through preservation, but through the act of passing on. Drawing on Maurice Halbwachs' theory of collective memory, Marc Augé's concept of productive forgetting and research through design, as well as critical making as a design methodology, the project argues that mourning is inherently relational — and that design can create conditions for that relationality to emerge between strangers.
Re·Member was developed as the thesis project for the Master of Arts in Design and Future Making at Hochschule Pforzheim, completed in 2026. It brings together physical computing, spatial design, and design research within a single practice.
More photos of the exhibit will be uploaded soon.
