One motivation underlying the adoption of digital technologies is that people are looking for ways to preserve their memories, document their lives and store their life’s story. We often feel the need to capture moments in our lives, retain them and revisit some earlier ones. Materiality also plays a role in our memorialization processes in the form of artifacts that we associate with our memories.

In this research, I study how tangible technology could be used to enhance our memorialization processes by combining physical and digital memories. I employed two projects – Penseive Box and Phylactery - to exemplify this concept. Penseive Box aims to serve as an embodiment of a person who has passed away. Phylactery provides a way to explicitly secure memories to physical objects.

In order to understand people’s perspectives on the systems, I conducted two ethnographic studies. Here, I present my motivations behind the two projects, their conception and the findings from the two studies. I conclude that tangible technology could be a valuable means to forge a connection between physical objects and our memories.