A memory composer for more thoughtful technology

The belief

Memory has always been about stories and keepsakes: dried flowers, a boarding pass, letters and postcards, photos of toothy smiles, a grandmother’s recipe written down by hand. Most software treats memory as content to scroll past. Glia is built for another kind of keeping: composing attention into a record of a relationship.

How do you design technology that helps people remember, relive, and reflect with the people they care about, without turning intimacy into a feed?

What I researched

Glia grew out of years of circling a related question: how do you build software that pays close attention to a person over time? An earlier product concept, Buttercup, was framed around lifelong learning. In research and beta feedback, something else kept surfacing: people recording conversations with family not to study anything, but so they could understand each other better through what they remembered together.

That ethnographic thread (memory as relationship, not curriculum) became Glia.

What I designed and built

As founder and design engineer I work across research, product strategy, interaction design, prototyping, and implementation, shaping the interface language, the memory model, and the experience of composing and sharing a shoebox with someone else.

You curate digital shoeboxes of moments and gift them to people you care about. The product is live as an iOS app and on the web, with a public product site and personal shoeboxes in use.

How it works

Glia is a place to keep the record of a relationship: stories, keepsakes, and the small things that make someone feel close again. Shared collections grow over time. The design commitments are poetic computing, wonder, organic interfaces that grow with you, and the belief that attention is all we have. Spend it on what matters.

Venture context

Glia is venture-backed through Restless Egg, an accelerator for artist-founders. The work has been featured in Dazed, and connected to public showcases including the Southbank Centre’s Creative Intelligence Festival and Tate Modern’s Evolving Studio programme.

Writing

I write about memory, attention, and building Glia on the Writing page and at gliahq.com/blog, including Memory Composer.