PARSONS SCHOOL OF
DESIGN PRESENTS:

This Is How I Remember You

Maheen Mumtaz

Designer, Artist
Maheen is a multidisciplinary designer, writer, and storyteller whose practice is rooted in memory, identity, and interconnection. Drawing from lived experiences and ancestral narratives, her work explores the entangled threads of colonialism, culture, time, and belonging. Through a speculative and research-driven approach, she traces microcosmic details—gestures, objects, spaces—to examine larger histories of shame, preservation, and resistance. Weaving together nature and relationships, her creative inquiries often blur the boundaries between the personal and the political, inviting new ways of seeing and remembering. At the core of her practice lies a deep commitment to honoring stories that live beyond language in bodies, in land, in silence.
Thesis Faculty
This Is How I Remember You
This Is How I Remember You is an interactive investigation into memory, loss, and transformation. The project explores how neurological shifts alter identity and perception, reframing memory not as a fixed archive but as an evolving performance. Engaging biophysical systems as metaphor and as interface, the visuals become sites of embodied experience. Users do not passively observe but actively reshape the environment, their input directly influencing particle behavior. This transformation of interaction reflects the core idea: memory is not static, but constantly rewritten. The project looks at memory through two lenses: as metamorphosis, and as archive. I use particle systems to create a multilayer of interactivity; making a visual representation inspired by neurological systems that shift and change as time passes, and incorporating real time interaction by encouraging users to directly influence the particle environment, disrupting and reshaping the system. In doing so, it proposes that memory lives not only in the mind, but in the movement of the body and the systems it interacts with.