Materialising Memories is a research programme that aims to study how well-designed systems and services can support remembering practices. We investigate remembering and forgetting, the effects of physical objects and digital media on memories in everyday life and the creation and curation of these objects and media. For example, we study how personal items, such as photos, objects in the home or jewellery, are used in everyday situations to remember and forget and how people desire to relive their memories. This knowledge is used to design and evaluate innovative objects and interactive products that facilitate remembering and forgetting in everyday life, during and after major life events, for those with healthy memories and for those with memory challenges.

Highlighted projects

More recent work can be found on the Updates and Projects pages.

Support & partners

The Materialising Memories team is spread across Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, University of Technology Sydney in Australia and the University of Dundee in Scotland, UK. Our funders include: STW VIDI grant number 016.128.303 “Remember to forget” of The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) awarded to Prof. Elise van den Hoven, Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project 190102068 on “Muscle Memory” awarded to Prof. Floyd Mueller and Prof. Elise van den Hoven, Dementia Training Research Centre awarded to Prof. Elise van den Hoven, Microsoft PhD Scholarship awarded to Prof. Wendy Moncur and Prof. Elise van den Hoven, Endeavour Research Fellowship awarded to Dr. Joe Tsai and several UTS Internal grants awarded to Prof. Elise van den Hoven.