Momento

Product Vision

Mini-disasters happen every day - each one prepares us for the big one.

Momento reframes the roles that time, preparedness, and social cohesion play in creating a daily culture of disaster preparedness in urban settings. By creating spaces for locals to anonymously bond over daily disasters and how they get through those tough moments, Momento helps city dwellers to understand that every moment has disaster potential and that each of us must continually prepare to face them together with our neighbors. Sharing triumphs over life’s little disasters builds a novel urban reality, where time is tracked by the disastrous events we anonymously support one another through. People do not need to wait for a distributed national tragedy to support one another. We can be there for our local community in small ways every day so that, when a mega disaster strikes, we all have a network of neighbors that we can rely on, and who can rely on us.

Product Prototype

How It Works

Acknowledging that any moment could be the moment disaster strikes, Momento helps city-dwellers record life’s (extra)ordinary disasters, anonymously sharing them with others to create a collective memento of life in the moment. From spilling coffee on a white shirt before an important meeting to learning that a novel virus is spreading in your community and there is no cure for it, the network of people in your area who are experiencing their own disasters right along side you can be a source of comfort and strength, redefining urban resilience in terms of the bonds between people.

Logging in to Momento allows you to see what is going on in the lives of those around you and how people are anonymously sharing stories, solidarity, and encouragement. Though Momento is designed as a social sharing service, it also works as a personal resilience diary where you can check in with yourself during good times and bad. As users engage with one another over time, a sense of resilience displaces the users’ sense of isolation because they have spent time mentoring and encouraging others, while being mentored and encouraged in return.

The Key Insight That Inspired Momento

City-dwellers live amongst strangers, often not knowing their next door neighbor. The phenomenon of urban anonymity combined with a lack of disaster preparedness presents a uniquely urban threat to resilience. City-dwellers need a way to connect with nearby strangers, while retaining the option to preserve their anonymity.

Experience Frame Snippets

Lessons Learned

Momento has been a breakthrough artifact in my graduate thesis inquiry because the insights gathered from expert interviews and the co-creation session reframed my perspective on urban resilience. Majority of the published literature in this area assesses the matter from the sustainability and infrastructure perspective, highlighting strategies leveraging intelligent engineering to reduce urban carbon footprints. Getting out into the field (via Zoom) and talking to disaster survivors, recent transplants from other cities, and long-time New York City residents revealed the tender, human aspects of resilience. As a human-centered service designer, it was delightful to listen to people with lived experience of infrastructure failure and national tragedy speak exclusively about the imperceptible ways urban inhabitants defend and revive their cities. This insight served as the foundation for future research and prototyping efforts focusing on services to strengthen the fabric of New York City neighborhoods as a means of enabling resilience.

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