what is monument?
memorialize Anyone or Anything, Anywhere.
Monument is an augmented reality platform that allows anyone to erect and inscribe a virtual monument anywhere in the world. There are countless invisible people and actions that deserve the honor, dignity, and visibility of a public memorial. Use Monument to commemorate events of personal significance or local cultural significance for the rest of the world to learn from, admire, and celebrate.
locate.
Find the perfect location to build your monument. Choose a public space associated with the memory of a person or event you wish to commemorate.
create.
Choose from a variety of personal and organizational categories that reflect the nature of your monument. These will help other monument-seekers find and appreciate your monument in place and in the app.
dedicate.
Inscribe your monument with important details. Tell the world who or what you’re commemorating and why its important to you, your location, and your community.
Make visible the full diversity of memories and experiences that already inhabit public spaces.
Monument is a fully working prototype made in WIARFRAME, an AR-wireframing platform. Monument’s three-dimensional objects were mocked up in SKETCHUP and BLENDER.
Users are able to approach and circumnavigate monument objects just like they would with a physical memorial object. When a user wishes to interact with a monument they can either tap it on their screen, or open “proximity settings” to automatically reveal inscriptions when they pass within three meters of a monument object.
the sociological frameworks
SOCIAL MEMORY, MYTH-MAKING, & POWER
Most public statues or memorials can be thought of as mythic, or myth-making objects. Their physical sizes are often imposing. Monuments have gravitas and dominion over their surrounding spaces, so much so that we can tell that a monument once existed in an urban space and was at some point removed. Monuments shape the void. The power imbued into these silent sentinels also shapes the way we understand the narratives of our own spaces and our history.
HOW DOES “SPACE” BECOME “PLACE”?
Places are simply spaces that have been imbued with personal or cultural historical meaning. As places become culturally defined they’re given constraints. We know for example, that there are particular experiences and memories you might have in a park, and those will be fundamentally different than what you might experience in a church. Understanding how people ascribe meanings to place helps us understand how monument-making is part of a diverse place-making or place-defining process.
WHAT ARE MONUMENTS TRYING TO SAY? TO WHOM?
Monuments refer to a particular limited narrative around a person or historical event by design. The Jefferson Memorial honors a version of Thomas Jefferson whose philosophical acumen helped shape America’s early nationhood. It does not speak to another Thomas Jefferson who owned slaves. In this sense monuments often have the power to shape our collective memory around people, places, and events. Monuments only tell us only what an individual or group believe is important to remember. This platform seeks to democratize the process of historical narrative-making to better reflect our cultural histories holistically.
the design frameworks
what should digital monuments look like?
Augmented reality monuments should have all of the gravitas of a “real” monument which is why they’ve been sized to be larger than life. From a distance you’ll be able to view the full object, but as you approach you’ll have to pan your screen up and down to get the full view. Just like a real monument!
One of the major challenges in Monument is to avoid a “graveyard” effect or a claustrophic experience in an area packed with monuments. Augmented monuments will be brightly colored and slightly translucent to maintain an exciting, celebratory, and pleasant experience for navigating any public space.
how do you interact with a digital monument?
Monument inscriptions appear on only one side of each augmented monument. Just like in real life, you’ll have to move around to the monument’s face in order to read its inscription. The goal here was lend the power of real monuments to augmented reality ones by imposing similar real-life constraints.
the prototype
usability test #1
The first usability test was conducted in Chicago’s historic Graceland Cemetery nearby the resting place of architect Louis Sullivan, the father of skyscrapers.
In this test the user was asked to identity each of the four monuments around them, choose the least opaque, and interact with it to read the inscription.
In the earliest iterations of Monument, I tested a number of different object types. Rectangular cubes that appeared fixed to the ground were the most effective in giving the impression that one was moving towards, away, or around the object. The user felt capable of judging distance and their position in relation to the object as they moved around it.
The process of approaching and walking around the monument was mostly smooth, although some minor changes were made to make the monuments hold their position in space more effectively. The size and scale of the monuments were changed slightly to appear fully within the phone screen from a 7-meter distance.
usability test #2
The second usability test was conducted independently of the researcher, although the user communicated by phone for the duration of the experience.
Users have been tasked to create their own personalized inscriptions, which I then upload into the wireframe for their own experience. This user chose to honor an experience related to a parent, and after approaching and interacting with their parent’s monument, reported feeling an overwhelming emotional catharsis.
When I conceived of this project, I understood that this could be a new opportunity for communities to share important events and people with each other. I did not expect my testers (or me), to be as emotionally overwhelmed by the experience of having a new way to demonstrate appreciation for the people or events that have made a positive mark on our lives.
Would you like to take monument for a test run? reach out to get a link and task list to make and test out your very own monument.
the way forward
Monument visual diversity
Initially I intended monuments to be spartan and abstract by design with category differences only communicated by a color code. After exploring a history of past and present monument construction in North America, I now intend for different monument categories to feature different constructions reflective of North America’s monument-building history.
Full mid-fidelity wireframe
While an app-map of Monument has already been sketched out, mortal constraints like time have prevented me from fully fleshing out that experience. The next step will be to make a fully functioning mid-fidelity wireframe of the Monument App in Figma.
usability testing with historical societies
Monument’s personal experience requires additional testing, but I have yet to fully explore how Monument can help local governments, historical societies, and community groups easily create their own sites of honor. Usability testing with these groups is key for the full functionality and utility of Monument.
moderation strategies
Monitoring social platforms is an incredible undertaking. While monument was purposefully conceived to exclude typical spaces for toxic behavior like live feeds, there remain a number of ways to abuse and undermine the social utility of this platform. My initial research into moderation strategies were focused on the technological. I identified the Wikimedia Foundation as having among the most passionate and successful volunteer moderation communities online and spent significant time attempting to apply their moderation strategies and networks to Monument. At the same time, the problem of moderation is also a sociological one. In light of this I am also consulting with a breadth of interdisciplinary literature on the SIDE (Social Identity of Deindividuation Effects) model. The SIDE model attempts to anticipate how varying levels of anonymity affect the ways individuals behave when introduced to new digital communities. A key next step in this process is to apply a wealth of both technological and sociological knowledge to create a healthy, effective moderation strategy that forwards the goals of Monument as a tool for public good.