Project Description
Find the Day is an interactive prototype that explores how a personal experience is translated into a specific date that a computational system can understand. The project began with my analysis of Days Matter, a date-tracking app that counts down to future events and counts up from past ones. I became interested not in how the app calculates time, but in an earlier and less visible step: before a system can calculate or remind us about a date, a personal experience first has to be converted into structured temporal information. In the final prototype, the interface takes the form of a personal calendar. If the user already knows when an experience happened, they can add the date directly. If they remember the experience but cannot place it precisely in time, they can enter a “Find the Day” process. An anonymous account asks questions about temporal clues such as season, weather, clothing, weekdays. As the user answers, a calendar updates in real time and gradually narrows the possible date range. The system distinguishes between dates that are clearly remembered, dates that are inferred or selected, and experiences that cannot reasonably be reduced to a single day. Rather than treating every result as equally certain, the prototype makes uncertainty part of the output. Through this project, I use date reconstruction as a way to examine a broader question: before a system can appear intelligent, what kinds of human experience must first be translated into information that the system can recognize and process?