The Problem
Older adults often value emotional continuity more than efficient information retrieval. However, existing digital systems prioritize storage, searchability, and convenience over familiar routines and meaningful rituals.
Afterglow is an intergenerational memory-sharing ecosystem that helps families create, share, and revisit meaningful memories.
Concept Overview
Our Goal
Design an IoT ecosystem that enables emotional continuity in aging.
Research Method
Why interviews?
We used interviews because emotional continuity lives inside personal routines, family habits, familiar objects, and small everyday stories that are hard to observe through metrics alone.
By asking older adults how they stay connected, preserve memories, and imagine later life, we could understand not just what they use, but what kinds of interaction feel reassuring, familiar, and worth keeping.
“My kids are all in college doing starting their own families, and it's hard to keep in contact with them with their own busy lives”
Beth
“I value tech by communicating with my kids and grandkids. That would be number one.”
Laurel
“I mostly look forward to small things, like talking to family, watering my plants, or going outside.”
Zhu
Insights + Design Direction
01
Older adults are not rejecting technology. They resist systems that disrupt stability, familiarity, and independence.
02
Connection matters, but direct communication can create pressure, obligation, or fear of becoming a burden.
03
The future is often imagined through small routines, relationships, memories, and emotional traces.
How might we design technologies that support emotional continuity while aging without demanding constant attention, adaptation, or surveillance?
01
Require little learning or maintenance
02
Blend into familiar routines and rituals
03
Keep memories under family control
04
Support emotional continuity across generations
Our Vision / Product Overview
afterglow
We envisioned an ecosystem that supports emotional continuity through tangible interactions rather than digital archives.
This turns into our design, afterglow: a set of connected objects that helps families create, revisit, and share memories through familiar rituals.
1
Nota
Creates memory tokens from stories and photographs.
2
Audite
Allows users to revisit personal and shared memories.
3
Tabula
Displays and shares memories across households and generations.
Ecosystem
3 interfaces, one system.
The ecosystem moves memory across household objects and connected homes, allowing stories to shift between physical tokens, ambient display, and personal listening without turning remembrance into another screen-based archive.
Video
Using Afterglow
Pamphlet
Risk and benefit guide.
A concise manual for helping families understand how to share memories thoughtfully, including setup, privacy choices, and the risks of physical memory tokens.
