Memory through Design: Supporting Cultural Identity for Immigrants through a Paper-Based Home Drafting Tool

Current research in HCI with immigrants predominantly focuses on their practical needs and little attention is given to their cultural identities. As such, we aim to understand how newcomers reflect their cultural values within domestic settings. We explore this by provoking memories immigrants associate with physical spaces inside their homes. Hence, we built "Our Home Sketcher": a paper-based home drafting tool that allows novice users to design their homes by sketching and implicitly expressing their space, light, and privacy preferences. The collected drawings are then fed into a computer algorithm that produces 3D models of the sketched houses. This process of design acts as an artifact-driven storytelling for heritage sharing and rapport building within migrant communities. We engage 13 Middle Eastern newcomers in Canada with the tool and use Halbwachs' [44] theory of collective memory to frame how home sketching provokes former experiences. Our findings show a strong longing for reclaiming the past, narrating space-related oral history, and designing beyond current limitations.