i³, you³, we all³

Spring Days '99 Conference Memory

Thomas Rist German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence rist@dfki.de

The construction of collective and shared memories has become a hot research topic in areas such as enterprise organisation and human resource management. It is also one of the central themes addressed by a number of i³ projects, including the Magic Lounge project.

A variety of different concepts and metaphors have been proposed for memory construction and access. At a Magic Lounge project meeting last September, a member of our team came up with a curious proposal. In essence, the idea was to rely on a kind of ‘Lego bricks’ metaphor for the design of a user interface for accessing a collective memory. The single bricks would correspond to single entries in the memory, and structural relations between entries would be represented by more or less complex and bizarre assemblies of bricks. We did not elaborate any further on this proposal, or embark on the development of an interface to test the usefulness of the concept.

However, a few months later an opportunity arose to think about it again. This time we were looking for suitable side-events and installations to enrich the programme of the Spring Days ‘99 conference. The construction of a common conference memory seemed to fit in nicely with this. But how to do it? Following the initial proposal as discussed in our project would have required considerable prog-ramming efforts and a lot of technical equipment at the conference site. So why not go for the straight-forward low-tech solution, such as using real Lego bricks? In fact, LEGO Systems A/S at Billund was generous enough to send two parcels full of LEGO Duplo bricks - almost 1000 bricks altogether!

The Spring Days Conference Memory. Contributions (in case you can't decipher them) included:"Best gay beach in Europe" "The replacement of the wheel is yet to be seen." "Hot collaboration!" and "Somebody is missing." Or, in short, "Now what was the question?"

Next, the bricks needed to be prepared so that one could write on them with a pencil or a ballpen. This was achieved with stick-on labels on a rainy Saturday afternoon.

In Sitges, the conference participants could pick up their Spring Days Memory Kit at the registration desk. Each kit contained three or four bricks, as well as printed instructions on what to do with them. The idea was that the attendees would write small notes on the bricks and insert them into an emerging 3D construction - the Spring-Days Conference Memory - which was located in the exhibition room. For bootstrapping purposes, notes on the preparation phase of the Spring Days were written on a number of bricks which were inserted into the memory before the start of the conference.

At the end of the Spring Days all memory kits were gone. But surprisingly enough, only a third of the bricks actually made their way to the conference memory. I can only speculate on what happened to the rest: some people probably just forgot to insert their bricks, while others may have preferred to take them home as a ‘material bit of private memory’. The notes on the bricks that were inserted included expressions of ardour and thanks for a variety of things, ranging from the workshops to the beautiful weather in Sitges. The conference memory was also used as a suggestion box directed at the organisers of future Spring Days; for example, the advice to distribute detailed programmes of all workshops to all participants in advance was found on several bricks. Other comments appeared to have a more personal flavour (‘Mike, we’re at the beach’).

With regard to the spatial layout of the overall assembly, we had anticipated that the arrangement of the bricks would reflect semantic relationships between the notes on the bricks. In the final ass-embly, however, such groupings were not apparent (at least not to me). We could have asked at the beginning to use the red blocks for complaints only, and the greens for positive impressions, for example, in order to obtain more meaningful constructions. But since no semantic construction rules were given on the instruction sheet of the memory kit, people seemed to worry more about finding a suitable geometric location for their bricks than about finding semantically-linked neighbourhoods. The final cons-truction is probably best described as a kind of a three-dimensional pinboard on which the place-ment of notes was constrained only by the physical properties of the bricks. Well, it was just an idea ...

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