MneMne is a data-driven accessories entrepreneurial design project that I initiated, established with team members in 2017 summer and carried on for two years. We explored different ways to generate physical products with real data, including public data, social data and personal data; along with innovating the business model for the startup.

Additional Team members
Zach Pino, Shuyi Liu, Melissa Cadet

Exhibition
”Shrinking Territories”,
Then, Now, Next: ID 80th Gala

Highlights

1. MneMne was a startup and an experiment of new product innovation based on the notion of “individualized mass production” product design.

2. We handled many aspects of a design-driven startup: product and business design, product testing, user experience design (web), materiality sorting, MneMne branding, publicity, partnership contact and negotiation, etc.

3. Over the two years working on the startup, we got approached by different organizations for collaborations, such as research databases, a digital fabrication company, museums, a wildlife charity group and an online fashion merchandise.

The Shrinking Territories collection sources data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (www.gbif.org), which serves as a platform for professional and citizen scientists to track animal sightings. We selected several keystone species and created algorithms which convert the sighting longitude-latitude data into mysterious — though legible — forms to encourage conversation about anthropogenic ecosystem change.

The earrings (right) from the collection render the changing recorded sightings of the Orca whale, a cosmopolitan marine mammal significant affected by territory loss due to the fishing industries. The back of the earrings show the contours of the Orca's territory in the 1960's, and each layer represents a decade of sightings in a specific area of the Pacific Ocean — revealing the drastic and mostly invisible-to-humans decline that has occurred in recent memory.

The Love Letters Quill is an individual product experience designed by me, with the technical advisory of Zach Pino. It is a blending piece of traditional writing ritual and contemporary object design. Words of love don’t mean enough. Love Letters Quill gives weight to letters and preserves memories of love between two people.

Personal Reflection

Aim for progress, not perfection. The main reason why the start-up was discontinued after almost two years of work, despite all the great work and outside olive branches, is that we tried too hard to “do it the right way“. I learned that a start-up needs to be lean and make incremental steps, in order to be successful. Put the products out there, make experiment moves in the business, learn and then pivot in the process.