Ten years ago my Grandad wrote and self-published his life memoir. Printed at the local bureau from a Word document, they were shared with his close family and friends. The purpose of publication was to enable the reader to know what my Grandad remembers of his history, and of himself, “I want them to know something about my background and what made me the person I am today…to tell the story primarily to family, to know me.”
In response to this, The Memoir Project has been created. An online platform in which writers, families and elderly alike can create their story – an artefact which embodies their identity, and contains their memory, the stories they want to leave behind.
The project began with a project thesis in the first semester, diving in to the proposed idea (my idea at the time was working out how to encourage and assist elderly in writing their life memoir).
Once I reached the second semester, I was more determined about where I wanted the project to go, and I started fleshing out my 'Compass' - expanding ideas on audience and the principles, observations, ideas and experiments I could expand on.
I started playing around with the photos that were included in Grandad’s original memoir, and drawing out the big life moments. Layering them together would represent the development of his identity as the reader makes their way through the book to complete the image of who he was.
I got right into designing Grandad's book from a conceptual angle, the next step was to start working on the wireframes/experience of the publication process of the audience.
Through feedback from meetings with lecturers, I started laying out the pages and getting the content together! This project combined both my Grandad's memoirs and sermons, so I was given the liberty of chopping up the content and reordering them based on life events and lessons entailed in the writing.
Throughout the project, I kept returning to my original compass and thesis work to make sure I was following the framework I had laid out at the beginning of the year. The idea is that this process could be repeatable with another user and their content. The end goal will look different depending on who the memoir is about, but the point is to have their story as a physical document to share with family and generations to come.
Assembling time! Once the books were professionally printed and bound, I went through and applied vinyl to many of the quotes throughout the book. I initially printed two copies, so I got pretty good at getting everything centred by the end of the project...
