IXD Capstone · 2025–2026 · Harmony Simpson
Designing the onboarding experience for the family genealogist — a private, physical-first system that lowers the labor of documenting oral history and protects Black family data from corporate erasure.
Research Findings
Eight in-depth interviews and seventeen surveys revealed that memory in Black families is overwhelmingly sensory, social, and embodied. The keeper of the archive is almost always one person — an elder woman — and when she goes, so does the history.
In every interview, the family's collective memory was held by a single person — overwhelmingly aunts and grandmothers. No redundancy, no system. When she goes, the archive goes with her.
Participants described digital storage as cold, costly, and controlled by corporations they have no reason to trust. One participant upgraded her Google Photos plan twice in a single month and still feared losing her photos.
Not one respondent said a folder of photos. They said: a cast iron skillet, wind chimes, mothballs and lavender, almond tea, the smell of Sunday church. Memory lives in the body before it lives anywhere else.
The act of organizing and uploading family history is experienced as work, not love. The friction is not just technical — it is emotional. The system must make documentation feel like ritual, not filing.
"People say African Americans don't have culture, but we made our culture from the ground up after being snatched. Our culture is word of mouth — it's in the stories."
— Eric, Interview ParticipantSensory Anchors Collected
Design Directions
The physical object and the local OS are not two options — they are two layers of the same thing. The object is the body. The OS is the mind. A physical heirloom or vessel is the key that unlocks a private, local experience. This is not a new idea. It is an inherited one.
Direction 01
The Oral Map
A microphone captures a spoken story and renders a living family constellation in real time — mapping names, relationships, and moments as the person speaks. The family tree draws itself from the voice.
Processing happens locally via Edge AI. No story leaves the room. The constellation belongs to the family, not the platform.
Direction 02
The Ancestral Vessel
A weighted physical object you can ask a question aloud. It draws from uploaded family data to return qualitative wisdom — not yes or no, but a voice, a memory, an ancestor's way of thinking through a problem.
A local family model that does not train on global data. Privacy is hardware-bound. The precedent: Paschal Beverly Randolph's magic mirror, 1858.
Direction 03
The Ancestral OS
A private, local operating system for family history that only activates when a physical key — a heirloom object placed on a sensor — is present. No cloud. No subscription. The hardware is the vault.
Zero cloud integration. Access is tied to physical presence, not passwords. The system cannot be accessed remotely, sold, or subpoenaed without the object.
On Lineage
Paschal Beverly Randolph
October 8, 1825 — July 29, 1875
During my own genealogy research — conducted alongside this project — I discovered my great-great-great grandfather: a Black abolitionist, physician, novelist, and founder of the first Rosicrucian order in the United States. His spiritual practice centered on a physical object — the "magic mirror" — used to access ancestral wisdom and inner vision. He nearly did not survive in my family's memory. He is now the clearest evidence I have for why this project is urgent, and what it should feel like to use.
Research Library
A living bibliography — the books, reports, and primary sources shaping the intellectual framework of Àṣẹ.
Books
Mules and Men
The original ethnography of Black Southern oral tradition, Hoodoo practice, and folk knowledge as living systems of knowing. The methodological ancestor of this project.
The Souls of Black Folk
The theoretical backbone for why documenting Black inner life is an act of resistance. Double consciousness as the condition this design must hold space for.
The Age of Spiritual Machines
The foil. Kurzweil imagines technology absorbing human consciousness. Àṣẹ is the counter-argument: machines that protect what is irreducibly human, not replace it.
Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture
The act of willing oneself into the future despite conditions designed to exclude you. The philosophical framework for building technology that serves Black imagination.
Simulacra and Simulation
Applied here to ask: at what stage does a digital copy of memory lose its connection to the original? The critical constraint on how Àṣẹ should and should not represent the past.
Data Feminism
A framework for examining who data systems serve, who they harm, and how power shapes what gets counted. Essential for designing an archive that refuses extractive logic.
Speculative Everything
Design as a form of inquiry, not just production. The permission to ask "what if" as a serious design method — foundational to this project's speculative vessel concepts.
Design for the Real World
Design as social responsibility. The reminder that tools built for communities must center those communities — not the designer's assumptions about them.
Man's Search for Meaning
On how meaning-making sustains people through loss. A lens for understanding why preserving family memory is not sentimental — it is survival.
Primary Sources & Reports
Dealings with the Dead
A primary source from the project's own ancestral lineage. Randolph's writings on spiritual practice, trance, and the relationship between the living and the dead — read here as design precedent.
Black–White Digital Inclusion Index
Statistical grounding for the digital equity gap: broadband access, STEM representation, and why Black communities have structural reasons to distrust platforms not built for them.
Contact
Senior, IXD Program. Creative technologist, advocate interventionist. Building at the intersection of oral tradition, data sovereignty, and ancestral intelligence.
This project is in active development through June 2026. I am seeking input from researchers, technologists, cultural practitioners, and community members who work at the intersection of Black history, memory systems, and emerging technology.