Designing Resilient Memory Infrastructures for Ephemeral Public Memory in Volatile Digital Environments

The paper explores how digital memory infrastructures could be designed for ephemerality instead of perpetuity in unstable platform contexts. Through an emphasis on memes as fragile but culturally meaningful memory relics, the study proposes MEMESCAPE, a speculative interface that reconceptualises collective memory as a malleable ecology instead of a static repository. An interpretivist approach to qualitative design research was taken, where eight participants engaged in walkthroughs of the prototype. The results are based on extensive field notes and reflexive memos. The results demonstrate how metaphor-based interaction can slow people's typical platform use, highlight discourse as an aspect of memory creation, and even facilitate moral consideration of impermanence and memory management. Rather than arguing for preservation in the traditional sense, the paper advocates for resilient intelligence as a form of interpretation for navigating impermanence and infrastructural collapse in a more informed manner.