Memory management of infinite canvas (Huang Yueyong) – EJ Tech

This articleauthorHuang YueyongHe is an associate professor and senior consultant (entrepreneurship) at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and writes a column for the Hong Kong Economic Journal titled “Kamikin“.

Many people have heard of the “revolving lantern of life”. Movies, TV shows or comics often use this to present the memories of a character’s life. This more or less reflects the traditional way people view memory as a timeline. Compared to the past when people relied on limited text and photos to recall the past, with the emergence of tools such as Apple Photos and Google Photos in the past 20 years, we can not only directly visualize the timeline of memories, but also filter the information and details of different life experiences in this “river of memory” by time, place and person.

As early as 2001, the late Apple founder Steve Jobs proposed the concept of Digital Hub, which is Apple’s development strategy of integrating its hardware, software and services to provide users with a unified ecosystem to manage and record their personal lives, leading to the birth of a series of products and services such as iPhone, iPad and iCloud. Over the past 20 years, I have been using these tools to build my own digital collection. However, as time goes by, I find that although these tools are useful, they also have many limitations.

Let me first talk about the number of my collections. A rough calculation shows that the accumulated images exceed 300,000, including photos, screenshots and other digital records. Although I have used software to manage them, the well-organized digital memory database I imagined is still far away from me. Like many people, the images collected in the database include not only precious memories, but also a lot of useless data saved casually, making it quite difficult to sort and organize; while digital tools are powerful, bugs are also common, such as the failure of Google Photos’ AI recognition, the disappearance of location data in photos, etc., which weakens its overall effectiveness.

In addition, the constant duplication of files after synchronization of different devices, or the large number of redundant photos and images from text messages and social platforms, have “polluted” the river of my memory.

The “infinite canvas” software that has become popular in the market in recent years is just right for us to better manage, recall and use our memories. Different from the traditional “from small to large” timeline, the concept of infinite canvas allows users to record, create and explore ideas in a vast and unstructured space.Miroallowing users to zoom in and focus on details or pan to see the overall event while recording; it is called the “second brain” by many people.conceptallows users to freely create interconnected blocks of information. This flexibility is like how the human brain actually works, interconnecting our memories and ideas to form a node network rather than traditional linear recall.

By zooming in and out, changing the frame, and shifting the perspective, this way of managing digital memory in time and space changes the way people look at their life journey. For some people, especially the elderly with dementia, it may help them recall important memories. The author also hopes that the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) can further improve the performance of tools, allowing us to more effectively “connect the dots” and build our own memory palace.

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