Memex and Beyond: A Design Trajectory from Vannevar Bush's Memex

Abstract

This project revisits memex, a hypothetical knowledge-storage device that Vannevar Bush proposed in 1945 and traces its trajectory in the perspective of interaction design. While the pursuit of memex from a technological perspective shows its benefits now, it is still questionable whether today's digital artifacts truly realize Bush's insights into the human thinking process of association. As a response to Vannevar Bush's memex, this thesis suggests mmx, a conceptual system that supports cognition and interaction using a non-intrusive augmented vision. Visualizing cognitive activities as the linkages between knowledge nodes, mmx enables tracking, linking, rearranging, and sharing of information sources according to how humans think, amplifying personal and collective knowledge. A video prototype of mmx was created with this text as a final outcome. The processes of multi-dimensional studies derived from Vannevar Bush's memex, a design research for understanding association, and the final execution to create the video prototype for mmx ultimately reflect the relationship of today's information technology and design, and their ideal development to support human intelligence.