I’m so relieved… as I was getting closer to the end of the post my brain started going “but the obvious, the obvious…” I think this is the best part (rather than a just a bonus) of the method you are describing.
The most common pitfall with this approach I can imagine, is somebody not making use of your aforementioned categories, just using one piece of furnature for each number. That would make the apartments very repetitive and lead to mixups down the road.
I think it makes sense to stick to single digits in this case too and just have multiple images per digit rather than going 2-digit to increase diversity my making it 100 object, because that would cut their number, and thus the number of locations you can use later on, in half.
As far as virtual memory palaces, definitely one that makes use of the fact that you are free to set it up as you please… using that to your advantage and make the journey points themselves part of the information encoding, rather than just a backdrop for the information you want to store, is very creative.
I’m doing something similar in this post, where I break up a big palace into various smaller ones and let the palace itself stand for some piece of information:
Have you considered usages other than phone numbers with this approach? Seems it wouldn’t be just limited to that… and phone numbers do change, so maybe using somebody’s date of birth (a constant value) and then place their phone number in one of the locations might be a more robust method. Otherwise, every time somebody gets a new phone number you gotta make them move to a new place.
If I started to combine that idea with my reverse lookup method I’ve linked… you could have a virtual town where each apartment is on a street that is determined by the month, so then you’d always know who’s birthday is coming up this month, by walking down that virtual street.
Nice post!