MEMOS

Freelance project

2025 / in progress

Freelance project

2025 / in progress

problem

The members of ANFCDG, an association of families of fallen and missing soldiers, are mostly elderly. When they go, the personal memories of war they carry will go with them.

solution

A participatory digital archive built on Omeka S, with a structured data collection flow and an operational guide for volunteer archivists, designed to be replicable across other association branches.

my role

Service design, UX/UI, and full technical development of the archive. I defined the information architecture, built the system, and designed the processes for long-term volunteer management.

problem

The members of ANFCDG, an association of families of fallen and missing soldiers, are mostly elderly. When they go, the personal memories of war they carry will go with them.

impact

The archive is live and operational. The experiential website and physical exhibition are paused due to funding constraints.

The association exists because of a shared loss. Its members are the children and grandchildren of soldiers who never came home. Sitting with them and listening to their stories made the urgency of the project concrete: these are not abstract historical records, they are personal accounts that exist only in the memory of people who are getting older. When they go, the stories go with them. 

Before touching any software, I mapped how the archive needed to work. Five entry points for exploration: events organized in historical periods, people, narrative stories, a map of places, and a browsable collection of physical objects (diaries, postcards, photos, interviews). Everything is connected through cross-references, so a diary links to a person, who links to an event, who links to a place. The structure was validated with a cultural heritage expert before implementation.

The challenge was not the archive itself but who would run it: elderly volunteers with limited technical confidence. The collection flow was designed around that constraint. Citizens contribute through a simple Google Form, files land automatically on Drive, a Google Sheet tracks every submission with status and archival ID, and only after review does content get published on Omeka S with full metadata and relationships. People contribute stories, the team builds the archive. 

I installed and configured Omeka S from scratch, defined all item templates and metadata vocabularies, and built the five archive sections with optimized experiences for each content type: timeline for events, narrative pages for stories, map view for places. Omeka S has limits in visual customization, so the current site is the institutional backend, not the experience that will come next. In parallel, I built a 135-slide interactive guide covering every operational task, step by step, designed specifically for the elderly.

The archive is live and usable. The experiential website and the physical exhibition, the parts designed to bring the archive to younger audiences through an immersive phygital experience, are paused waiting for funding. But the system was designed from the start to be replicable: the same architecture, flow, and guide could be adopted by other ANFCDG branches across Italy. 

Building a working archive alone pushed me to be a developer rather than a designer. Choosing the right open-source tool, configuring it, and designing around its constraints taught me that technical decisions are design decisions. They shape what the system can and cannot do.