Let’s Go For a Walk is an Augmented Reality (AR) project. Created by mending a family quilt, it celebrates our family’s love for nature, time spent together, and how we might share those stories with each other. Embroidered leaves of trees in their neighborhood become shifting repositories of memories, an editable archive, unlocked through a companion AR mobile app.
This exploration was inspired by Shannon Mattern’s essay titled “Maintenance and Care.” In the essay she reflects on Steven Jackson’s idea of broken world thinking--the proposition “that we take erosion, breakdown, and decay rather than novelty, growth and progress as our starting points in considering relations between society + technology.”
Sitting with this quote, I was reminded of my brother’s worn childhood quilt, and became curious to see what might develop if I made room to find out more about it, and equally what it would mean to mend or repurpose it, to use it as an inspirational point for something new. How could I combine the tactile, object-based storytelling of quilts with my nephews’ love for all things mobile and AR. Essentially, how to combine new and old ways of storytelling?
