Mæmorium: Designing a Way to Relive Life, Not Just Record It
Dec 20, 2024
Somewhere between “we capture everything” and “we actually remember something,” the experience of memory got flattened.
Our camera rolls are full. Our cloud storage keeps expanding. Our group chats are packed with proof that things happened.
And still, most of what we care about gets lost in the noise.
That tension became the starting point for our Hackweek project in Barcelona: Mæmorium.
In 32 hours, a small team (Ilayda, Kayla, Alejandro, Maxime, and me) explored a product concept built around a simple belief: capturing a moment is not the same as being able to return to it.
This post is the story of what we built, the product thinking behind it, and the bigger vision I’m aiming at with Mæmorium.
Why Mæmorium exists
Modern recording tools are optimized for sharing, not for meaning.
They are great at producing content. They are less great at preserving the feeling of being there. Most of the time, they also ask you to interrupt the moment you want to keep.
That is why I keep coming back to a simple truth: we capture a lot, but we cherish very little.
It is not because we do not care. It is because today’s tools turn memory into files, and files are work.
You have to search. You have to sift. You have to decide what is worth keeping. You have to remember that something exists in the first place.
Mæmorium starts from a different angle. It treats memory as something you should be able to re-enter, not just store.
The interface shift that makes this inevitable
Not everyone walks around with a headset today. That is obvious.
But the bet is not “VR headsets everywhere.” The bet is that immersive capture gets smaller, lighter, and more ambient over time. Hardware trends tend to move in that direction: less friction, more portability, and devices that blend into your life instead of demanding your attention.
If capture becomes frictionless, the software layer becomes the real product. You stop designing a gallery and start designing an experience for returning.
Hackweek gave us a constraint that helped. We could not build the future hardware. We could, however, design what the product might look like today using a UI language that already points toward spatial computing. So we leaned into a VisionOS-style interface and built a concept around a few core surfaces: Home, Timeline, People, and playback.
The key product idea: capture should be retroactive
The long-term concept I care about most is this:
You are living your life. You are not filming. You are not holding up a phone.
Something meaningful happens. The kind of moment you usually only realize mattered after it is already gone.
You press a button.
And the system saves the last X minutes.
The exact number is not the point. The point is retroactive capture. Not “start recording now,” which is always too late. It preserves what just happened, with the emotional truth of the moment intact, and without forcing you to perform for the camera.
That interaction changes the relationship between humans and recording.
You stay present first. You choose preservation second.
From there, the rest of the product becomes a matter of organization, access, and permission. You decide what stays private, what becomes part of a personal archive, and what is shareable with family or friends.
This is where Mæmorium stops being a media app and becomes something closer to a personal memory vault.
The moment the concept closed the loop
The most satisfying part of this project was that we did not just talk about a “memory machine.” We used Hackweek itself to create one.
Throughout the 32 hours, I recorded small fragments as we went. Not staged highlights, but real moments. Sitting together brainstorming. Heads down building. Little reactions when something clicked. Celebrating at the bar later that night.
When it came time to present, we introduced the concept and then delivered a memory from the very week we had just lived.
We invited people to put on the Vision Pro and relive that recap. It turned the pitch into an experience. You were not being told what Mæmorium could be. You were stepping into it.
That was the point. If the product is about returning, the best demo is a return.
And it worked. The company voted, and Mæmorium won Hackweek 2024.
What we built in 32 hours
Hackweek outputs should be coherent more than complete. The goal is not to ship a product. The goal is to prove a product idea is legible, emotionally compelling, and structurally sound.
Here is what we built.
A small branding kit that sets the tone
Mæmorium needs to feel emotionally safe. It cannot read as a gadget app, and it cannot look like social media wearing a softer color palette.
So we built a minimal brand system with restrained colors and typography that can hold intimacy without becoming sentimental. The palette leans dark and calm, with soft purples and light neutrals. The typography pairs a clean sans-serif for navigation with a serif for memory titles and moments that deserve weight.
Design choices like this are not decoration in a product like Mæmorium. They are part of the promise.
A Home view designed for returning, not browsing
Most consumer products train you to scroll. We wanted to train you to return.
In the prototype, Home is not a feed. It is closer to an entry point into your archive, with a featured memory and recent memories beneath it.
That arrangement is subtle, but it encodes the point of the product.
A memory is not content. It is a doorway.
A Timeline that feels like life, not like files
We designed a timeline experience that supports different time scales, so you can move through day, month, and year.
The goal was to make navigation feel natural. Real remembering is rarely a perfect search query. It is often a vague impulse. That week. That winter. That phase.
A timeline that lets you zoom through time is a way of honoring how memory actually works.
A People view that matches how humans index memories
If you ask someone to recall a moment, they rarely start with a date. They start with a person.
That is why we designed a People view where faces act as entry points into clusters of memories.
This is also where the permission model becomes powerful. Memories can be linked to people for navigation without automatically being shared. Connected and accessible should not be the same thing.
A memory playback moment with context
A memory should not open like a file. It should open like a return.
We designed a playback surface with a clear “Play memory” action and contextual details like when it happened. We also explored lightweight commentary as part of the memory object itself.
The point is not engagement. The point is co-memory. Other people hold details you forgot, and sometimes a single line can resurrect an entire atmosphere.
What we intentionally did not optimize for
Mæmorium is not designed to turn your life into content. It is not designed to make you record constantly. It is not designed to reward broadcasting.
The product only works if it protects the emotional core of memory. That means it has to be private by default, and it has to be built around intention.
That privacy stance is not a feature. It is the whole contract.
Assumptions
Every concept like this rests on assumptions. Here are the ones I am comfortable making, and the ones I would want to validate early.
Capture will get more ambient over time, which changes what recording feels like and makes retroactive saving plausible as a mainstream behavior.
People want a private memory archive that is not social media, something closer to a personal vault than a broadcasting platform.
Memory recall is associative, not file-based, so people, time periods, and context are better navigation primitives than folders.
Selective sharing is more valuable than default sharing. The value is in choosing what becomes part of your heritage, not in pushing everything outward by default.
Product hypotheses
These are the product bets I would test first, because they determine whether Mæmorium becomes a meaningful tool or just a beautiful concept.
Retroactive capture creates healthier recording behavior. Saving the last X minutes reduces performative filming and increases the number of truly meaningful moments preserved.
Immersive playback increases revisit rate. If memories feel like experiences rather than files, users return more often, for longer, and with more emotional resonance than they do in a camera roll.
People-based navigation outperforms folder-based organization. Users find what they want faster, and rediscover forgotten moments more often, when they navigate through people and time rather than through albums.
Privacy-first defaults increase trust and retention. A memory product lives and dies by trust. If the system feels safe, users store more meaningful moments and treat the archive as permanent.
Lightweight context beats heavy editing. Users prefer small, fast ways to add meaning, like titles, tags, or a short note, rather than complex editing workflows.
Product vision
Mæmorium begins as a personal vault for moments you choose to keep. It treats capture as intentional, not constant. It makes playback feel like return, not retrieval.
Over time, Mæmorium becomes a heritage layer. Not a public timeline, but a private lineage. The memories you choose become a living archive that can be shared with family on your terms, shaped over years, and revisited across generations.
The long horizon is not about headsets. It is about the feeling that your past is accessible in a way that is rich, safe, and human.
In a world where media gets cheaper and more abundant every year, the scarce thing becomes meaning. Mæmorium is an attempt to build for that scarce thing.
What Hackweek reminded me about building
Hackweek has a way of compressing product thinking into its most honest form. The output is never finished, but it is revealing.
We built a concept about remembering, and we also lived a sprint that will itself be worth remembering.
That is the kind of work I want to keep doing. Products that sit at the intersection of emerging interfaces and deep human utility. Products that feel like the future, but still respect the present.
Mæmorium is not finished, and it is not supposed to be. It is a direction. A bet. A taste of a product world where we stop treating memory as content, and start treating it as something you can return to.
And the question that started it all still holds:
What happens to your most cherished memories?
