Memory and practice: how tools mediate memories

The paper discusses the concept of “social memory” which is mutuated by one of the most representative scholar of the Russian cultural-historical school, Lev Vygotsky. According to his positions, higher mental processes in the individual have their origin in social processes. People create external memory aids like knots or marking signs to remember things, and these artefacts modify the way in which people remember, think and behave. The creation and the use of signs, in particular writing, the language and the art are culturally-based and socially-based cognitive processes. This concept of “social memory” constitutes the theoretical framework for the design of HIPS, a hand-held electronic tour guide allowing tourists to navigate both the physical space and a related information space when visiting a museum or a city. HIPS detects the position of the tourist and provides personalised and contextual information. Our hypothesis is that such a tool can mediate higher mental processes involved in the fruition of art, where artworks are by themselves objects of memory and means for new and unexpected semantic combination of concepts.