After examining these case studies, I determined a suitable workflow for this project: 

1) I would interview several of my friends about an important memento in their life that they have either lost over the years or left at home once they came to college. The important part of these interviews is that the person cannot have easy access to the memento, as I thought that might lead to a situation where they simply compare the accuracy of the recreation instead of focusing on the memory.

2) I would choose two friends' objects to recreate with digital fabrication techniques (including 3D printing, laser cutting, 3D scanning, etc.). The chosen friends would be unaware of my efforts to recreate their mementos. 

3) I would have final interviews with those two friends where I show them their digitally recreated mementos and capture their feelings and expressions about the newly created objects. 

Based on my research and intuition, I predicted that the digital recreations, no matter how close they might look to the actual object, would not transfer over the memories effectively; in other words, the new objects would be essentially junk instead of a memory.