MA DESIGN






EXPANDED PRACTICE    

Remembering Before Forgetting 
                        
Yilin Jiang
@'linjone0/dot_anddots


This is a research and design project centred on the question of how memories might be remembered before they are forgotten. The project began with my grandmother’s experience of taking part in the construction of a reservoir in 1959. By 2025, however, this history had already been gradually forgotten, diluted, and even rewritten.

In tracing how this sixty-six-year-old memory has slowly faded, I came to realise that fragmented oral accounts offer another way of understanding history. They carry emotions that large-scale, official narratives often fail to capture. Yet oral memories, tied to individuals, are far more fragile than written archives and are easily forgotten as they pass from one generation to the next. This led me to ask: do personal oral memories also need a way to be collected and remembered?

With this in mind, I designed this tool to encourage people to record memories that have never been written down, allowing them to be remembered and carried forward. For the exhibition, I created a hanging display so that visitors could take the tool away and use it themselves.