Stories Mailbox
Turning personal stories into something you can stumble across, take home, and pass on.
Stories Mailbox is a participatory archive that transforms story collection into a playful physical-digital experience. Visitors can submit memories through an interactive website, discover stories through emotional and narrative connections, and encounter them physically through an NFC-enabled thermal printing installation.
Visit the mailbox at: www.storiesmailbox.com
Roles
Project Lead · Interaction Designer · Developer · Experience Designer
Areas
Interaction Design · Web Design · Creative Technology · Prototyping · Installation Design
Recognition
Vietnam's Festival of Creativity & Design — Living Archive | 2026
{Care_Code_Culture} Exhibition — Singapore | 2026
INTERLUDE — MA Design WIP Exhibition | 2026
"The goal was to make browsing feel less like retrieving information and more like wandering into someone else’s memory."
Archives don’t have to feel like archives
Stories Mailbox grew from an earlier physical story-collection experiment that gathered more than 50 family stories. What stood out was that people were interested not only in reading the stories, but also in contributing, sorting, comparing, and discovering them.
I wanted to keep that sense of participation when moving the collection online, rather than turning it into a conventional database.
Designing for discovery, not just storage
Instead of relying only on search or rigid categories, the archive lets people explore stories through things that feel closer to how memories are actually understood: emotions, relationships, narrative focus, and personal context.
The submission process was also designed as part of the experience rather than as a standard form, using prompts that help people think through what happened, why it mattered, who was involved, and how it felt.
"A guided submission flow that uses simple prompts to help contributors shape and categorise their stories without making the process feel like filling in metadata."
"A web-based archive where stories can be submitted and explored through emotional tone, relationships, and narrative themes rather than only through conventional search."
"A guided submission flow that uses simple prompts to help contributors shape and categorise their stories without making the process feel like filling in metadata."
Bringing digital stories back into the real world
For the exhibition version, I connected the archive to NFC cards and a thermal printer.
Visitors could trigger the installation and receive a randomly selected story as a printed receipt. Each printout became a small physical fragment of someone else’s memory, while a QR code linked back to the archive so visitors could contribute their own.
"Physical NFC cards act as playful entry points into the installation, triggering a random story from the archive with a simple tap."
A living archive
Stories Mailbox treats an archive as something that keeps moving rather than a place where stories simply sit. Memories can be submitted, surfaced, printed, encountered by strangers, and returned to the archive through new contributions.
The result is a system where the value lies not only in preserving stories, but in creating unexpected moments of connection between the people who leave them behind and the people who encounter them later.