Totem Trailer from TKOH on Vimeo.

Kacie Kinzer is co-founder of TKOH design studio, a winner of the Knight News Challenge on Mobile to develop an iPad platform for easily sharing personal stories. The platform launches today.

After my grandfather was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, I drove to his ranch in New Mexico with a box full of old photographs and the resolve to begin recording the stories of his life. I tried several different approaches to chronicling his experiences, but the deeper I went in the process, the more overwhelmed I felt. I wanted to translate some of the magic and texture of my grandpa’s analog life into a digital artifact that I would treasure forever, but I didn’t want to invest endless hours crafting those recordings into something that felt worthy of his legacy.

It was this frustration with existing options that led me and my co-founders, Caroline Oh and Tom Gerhardt, to apply for the Knight News Challenge on Mobile. We wanted to develop an app that would enable anyone to capture the stories of their lives using the ubiquitous technology of the iPad. The grant allowed us to create a tool — a free app called Totem — that makes it easy and fun to have conversations with loved ones. Totem guides people through the entire interview experience — from choosing questions, to recording conversations, to pairing those recordings with images and text. Most importantly, the app seamlessly transforms these conversations into a beautifully crafted video that captures the stories of those we love in their own voice, words and photos.

As part of Knight’s support, Caroline and I tested the earliest versions of Totem by gathering a small collection of tales from notable ranchers born in the early 20th century in New Mexico. We shellacked a rental car with dust from bumpy, unpaved roads as we drove across the state from one ranch house to another. In each, we asked the same series of questions, and captured incredible accounts from men and women of character — from the story of a prisoner of war in a Japanese work camp, to the story of a young boy helping find a crashed plane on horseback. We realized as we bumped our way around the state that we had not only created an app for capturing stories, but a tool that brought parents, grandparents, children and friends closer together as they shared the experiences that defined them.

Just weeks after we submitted Totem to the App Store, I heard from the family of one of these wonderful people whom we had interviewed. His granddaughter texted me saying, “Hi Kacie. Grandpa passed away yesterday. I wanted to let you know I showed my family the Totem video for Grandpa, and they absolutely loved it. Lots of tears and laughs…they would like to put it on flash drives for some family members. We would also like to have it playing at the funeral reception.”

A Totem can become an emblem of a loved one, a family or a friendship that people return to again and again. In the months that we’ve been working on this project, we’ve come to understand that what we were making is a tool for people of all ages to come together to share experiences and perspectives not just about the past, but also the present moment. These stories shape a family narrative, and they help create our identity by teaching us who we are and where we come from.

In spite of having learned so much about the value of stories and the importance of taking the time to record them, it does take effort to create an alternate space for reflection with someone else. Totem helps people physically gather together in the way we used to sit down around dinner tables to trade words and ways of making sense of life, and gives them a context for sharing perspectives and experiences. As excited as I am about the launch today, I am more excited to see what people do with the app. I hope that they use it to create something that they will return to again and again and again to relive the memories and moments that they treasure in a stunning visual artifact.

Contact Kacie Kinzer via email at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter @kaciekinzer.