The mediabook project; taking charge of your own content. – Konstantin Economou

Working together with elderly peoples´ stories and memory to actively select, govern and access media content out of reach of the algorithms. Do it yourself and together with your significant others – Spotify doesn´t really know what you like, and why it is important.

In this project, we have studied a dozen elderly people who live in a residence for the Elderly in Norrköping, Sweden and worked with them to bring out their stories and memories – of what has been important in life, or of the media memories they have. What was it like going to the movies during the war? Stories that give us both a glimpse of the person, but also how this reflects the world they lived in.

The purpose of our project is to investigate and understand how the storytelling of the elderly can work in everyday life and how their cultural and media context can be strengthened and highlighted. It is also about working together with the elderly, relatives and also caretaking staff to work with the elderly persons’ stories, and their own choice of cultural content – and with making these relevant and accessible in people’s everyday surroundings. We thus work both collaboratively and technically experimenting with how to raise the quality of the cultural context of everyday life. We know from both experience and research that cultural well-being is important and needs to become an important part of care.

We combine research on the elderly with cultural and media production, technical development, and design. In our first prototype, the “Mediabook”, we have incorporated stories and memories into an easily accessible book that incorporates experimental organic sensor technology that we built into the book, making it an interface but first and foremost, an everyday object that could be used to access and cast media files on other devices, like the television set. We are currently working on sensors that can be easily incorporated into objects that are already present, and important in peoples ordinary lives, your favorite shirt, or coffee mug making the contexts and the objects that we ourselves choose, as well as the contents of what we want to tell and to hear, be the foregrounded – rather than chosen for us, either by algorithms or by other people that might care for us, but maybe do not really know us…