Mnemonics [excerpt]
In ancient Greece, the cultivation of memory was considered an art form. The goddess, Mnemosyne, mother to the Muses, reigned over poetry, philosophy, performance, and, perhaps, over graphic design as well. The classical mnemonists were primarily orators and rhetoricians who practiced the arts of memory to enhance their abilities to remember speeches and spoken histories.

The success of the methods relied upon two things: an individual’s familiarity with an ornamented interior space, such as a theater, where that person would mentally place memories as objects; and on a person’s ability to imagine wildly. Specifically, these orators divided the narratives, speeches, or songs to be memorized, into constituent parts, and then made up stories that would integrate these parts with their chosen landmark objects or architectural features.

In the mnemonic model, concepts are remembered spatially; therefore, a vast amount of information can be accessed from any direction, and from any one point in time. Stories may be recounted forwards, backwards, or non-linearly.

World Memory Championships, poster series
These posters were created for Skolos-Wedell’s Poster Design class at RISD in Spring 2006. The assignment was open, only requiring the series to consist of three posters. This is one of my first attempts to consciously apply mnemonics to graphic design problems. The World Memory Championships, also known as the memory olympiad, is a yearly competition in which individuals compete in various mind games, such as memorizing and recalling lists of random numbers, name-face associations, and words to unpublished poems. The olympiad was started by Tony Buzan.

This series is an attempt to apply strategies of the “journey method” to communicating information about the event to an audience in New York City. In the journey method the memorizer uses a well-known mental path (in this case a mental map of the world that locates countries from west to east, starting from the US and ending in Malaysia, where the competition will be held), in order to ground chunks (retainable portions of an unweildy pool of data) of information related to the event. I added the association of a sequence of playing cards, a popular event at the games.

The posters are meant to be displayed one per week over a period of 3 weeks such that the viewer on the street actively recalls elements and data from posters past. He/she may ask “What is the same?” or “What is different?” all the while bringing the announcement of the event into greater consciousness.

(Learn more about the World Memory Championships at www.worldmemorychampionship.com)