My great-grandmother’s over-100-year-old house in Ningbo was demolished in 2021, while its furniture and artefacts had been dispersed among different branches of the extended family. In response to a shared desire within the family to reconnect with the lost home and preserve its memories, we initiated a process of collectively documenting, interpreting, and digitally reconstructing this ancestral house.

The project began with a family meeting in 2020, followed by two fieldwork visits to document the house before its demolition. In March 2024, four branches of the family gathered for a participatory workshop to review the digital reconstruction, digitise the remaining artefacts, and discuss their spatial arrangements. Elders actively facilitated artefact scanning and contributed memories, stories, and interpretations of the house, objects, domestic life, and family history.

These conversations revealed many previously undocumented memories and interpretations, which informed both XR-based digital design and family memory-making. The family collectively decided how objects should be arranged and how different types of absent heritage could be reconstructed, represented, and experienced in situated, immersive, and interactive ways.

While the first phase of the project has been completed, the project continues as an ongoing iterative participatory process, with family members contributing memories, historical materials, and design ideas to shape how our heritage is represented and transmitted to younger generations.