A ROCKING chair that persuades elderly people to tell stories about their
childhood will help to preserve valuable oral history, according to Jennifer
Smith of MIT’s media lab. She developed the interactive rocking chair because
she regretted not having a way of recording all her grandmother’s family tales.
“When she died we lost all her stories with her,” Smith says.
In Smith’s system, the elderly person sits on a rocking chair in front of a
large screen displaying a life-size, graphic image of a little girl. She tells a
story of her own and then asks the person in the…
