Hi — my name is Eddie, and I dreamt up this strange time machine called Footprint. How did I get here?
Growing up, I spent most Sundays visiting my Grandma Celia with my dad and brother. Celia had dementia and no longer recognized my father, her own son.
Watching a mother look at her son and not know him stayed with me. It showed me how fragile memory and cognition really are.
She was the last of her generation in our family. As her mind faded, so did the stories, memories, and family lore only she carried.
Long before I could articulate it, I understood that when the final holder of a story forgets it, that story disappears for good. Celia’s experience was far from rare: today, roughly one in nine Americans age 65 and older is living with Alzheimer’s dementia.
Years later, while studying music at Dickinson College, I encountered an idea that would help shape Footprint. Music is an abstract art form: organized sound unfolding through time. Yet notation gives it visible structure, mapping the relationships between notes so a composition can be preserved, interpreted, and performed again and again.
Could the relationships among memories, ideas, people, and objects be given a structure of their own?
I spent the next decade as a music copyright researcher, where a song — its melody, harmony, and lyrics — could be identified, attributed, protected, and assigned value despite having no physical form. Photographing portraits taught me the reverse. The things we keep, whether a photograph, a recipe, or an heirloom, are often simultaneously priceless and unsellable. Copyright crystallizes an intangible creation into an intellectual asset. Nothing does that for a keepsake. It is a sentimental asset, valuable only because of the meaning attached to it — and much of that meaning lives outside the frame.
A lifelong interest in astronomy set all of it against something larger: we are not merely inhabitants of the universe but conscious parts of it, capable of creativity, love, and remembrance — which makes the things we imbue with meaning evidence of how the universe experiences being alive.
Meanwhile, virtually unlimited digital storage had made hoarders of us all, saving every text, email, post, and photograph. To what end? Was there a better way to record a life?
Footprint was born.
Footprints use familiar elements of a social post — a photograph, caption, date, place, or person — but put them to a different use. Instead of building a network of friends, related footprints draw toward one another to build a network of meaning.
The result is not a feed, timeline, or digital scrapbook, but a living map as unique as the person creating it. Its connections reveal how the pieces of a life belong together, allowing patterns to emerge that a linear account might never show.
Like a garden, a Footprint is cultivated gradually. It grows richer as new elements are added, old ones are revisited, and connections take root over time.
Footprint rests on a simple conviction: our lives are not content. The people, places, objects, and experiences that shape us deserve to be preserved in context, understood through their relationships, and carried forward.
I’m a father now, and I think about what my son will one day know about the people who came before him. Had Footprint existed when I was growing up, my family might still have more of Grandma Celia: her stories, her memories, her voice. Footprint cannot preserve a person completely. But it can help ensure that more of what made them who they were remains.
Everyone leaves a footprint. This is the place to make yours.