Catching up with MEMEX: Promoting social cohesion with an augmented reality app

Two years after the EU-funded MEMEX project ended, its digital storytelling app has been adapted to help mobilise action in cities close to water and provide fragile populations with access to information that can be used to enrich their lives.

Digital Economy

Society

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The MEMEX project was launched in 2019 with the goal of building social cohesion and helping to improve life for society’s marginalised individuals and communities through inclusive storytelling. Working with three groups at risk of exclusion – migrant women in Barcelona, citizens living in Paris’ 19th arrondissement, and first-, second- and third-generation migrants living in Lisbon – it sought to empower these communities to tell their stories and claim their rights in European society.

The power of an app

MEMEX’s technological achievement was a smartphone app that allows non-expert users to create stories of their personal experiences digitally linked to the geographical locations of events, places or objects. Using augmented reality (AR), they can annotate any physical location or object with their memories in the form of digital images, videos, audio recordings or texts.

Now, 2 years since the project’s end in 2022, the digital storytelling app continues to have an impact through subsequent European projects. It is being used and adapted in the EU-funded Bauhaus of the Seas Sails project, whose pilot activities are aimed at reconnecting local communities to their bodies of water. It has also benefited the RAISE ecosystem funded by Italy’s Ministry of Universities and Research with investment from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, part of the NextGenerationEU programme. One activity focuses on supporting fragile populations in accessing useful information related to the urban environment using AR.

“EU support was fundamental for the development of the technological platform and for the co-design of the app in the MEMEX pilots,” states Alessio Del Bue from the Italian Institute of Technology that coordinated the project. According to the researcher, this is what made it possible for MEMEX outputs to be used in other projects too. “This demonstrates that the project can go beyond the original objectives and serve as a platform that can be adopted in other contexts.”

Keywords

MEMEX, marginalised, community, augmented reality, storytelling, digital, social cohesion, app