Next year, the 9/11 Memorial Museum will open with its first exhibit: a multimedia collage meant to capture how people remember the event. When visitors walk in, they'll be greeted by recordings of people from around the world recounting where they were and what they felt seeing the attack. Fragments of their speech will be shown on screens around the hall, their words forming maps. It's meant to drive home the idea of 9/11 as a global event, and one that belongs to everyone who remembers it — whether they were adults in New York or growing up somewhere far away. Visitors to the museum will also be invited to record their own memories.

As The Wall Street Journal describes, the museum will also showcase other exhibits, including memorials to the people who died at the World Trade Center, at the Pengaton, and on Flight 93. One display will play emergency calls or voice messages from those inside the World Trade Center during the attack, used with permission of the families. While it's not the first memorial to use personal testimony or recordings, designer Jake Barton has had to grapple with both the magnitude of the event and representing something that happened relatively recently. Instead of trying to describe the event, museum director Alice Greenwald says they intend the museum to be simply about communication. "We're simply saying, 'We know you know,'" she says.