Time is often taken for granted, we use clocks and calendars to manage our schedules, but what if time could be shown to you in a way that reveals new information about yourself? This inquiry led to the exploration of The Tree of Life, a time and memory keeping app and interactive artwork that documents emotions surrounding memories.

Time is often kept by a person through their memories, and photos have been an age-old way of holding those memories. Tree of Life allows someone to be able to interact with photos that hold strong emotions in a way that shows you how your feelings have changed about them over time.

Design Process

A tree’s interior rings reveal a lot of hidden information, namely about its formation and environment. We used tree rings as the guiding metaphor to explore the concept and visualization of memories that are formative to a person. An important aspect of this exploration was to create an element of discovery, where a person can use the external visualization of the tree to discover which areas of their life are the most formative.

Tree of life was born out of a one week course, trying to reflect on ways that time can be measured, kept, tracked or shared, thinking about meaningful moments that have shaped your life and make you who you are.

After researching and understanding which moments are the most important in people's lives, and understanding that we all have different priorities, a tool was created that allows us to visualize the most significant moments in life and see how priorities change according to time.

Tree of time includes a phone app and also an interactive screen, where you can upload your most meaningful moments, classify them and see how many moments you have per classifications. Each classification is represented by a tree ring. We used this metaphor because every ring of the tree represents a season that they have passed, so instead of measuring a person by the years they have been on earth we want to measure how meaningful their life  has been.

The user can have the interactive screen at a personal place where it can help to remember those moments that have been good but also those who have shaped you, make you stronger and be  the person you are.