Examining death, bereavement, and legacy through digital traces
Social media is not designed to deal with death and what happens after. Come to think of it, few people are. At the time I am writing this article, there have been close to 200,000 COVID-related deaths in the United States alone. With social distancing norms and stay-at-home orders, people have been relying on social media to express grief and loss now more than ever. People have started to memorialize accounts of the recently deceased by expressing their feelings through posts and commenting on old photos. The social aspect aside, you can look at this design space through the lens of digital sustainability, ownership rights, and digital legacy preservation. There is also the dimension of studying the 21st century culture through the digital traces we leave behind. For my capstone project, I would be exploring how HCI can play a role when it comes to dealing with death and bereavement through social media.
A study conducted by Carl J. Öhman and David Watson published in April 2019 shows a minimum of 4.9 million accounts will pass away by 2100 if Facebook continues to expand at current rates. With this possible scenario, I seek to explore the question of how to make this a mediated experience for people experiencing loss while taking in aspects of digital sustainability, data archiving, and digital heirlooms.
When I think about how people interact with the social media accounts of people who are deceased, I see it as a reflective experience. When I went through this experience myself, I had this strange feeling when I read messages and posts on social media by these legacy accounts. There’s a bit of sadness mixed in with an experience of reliving old memories and a stark realization that this person represented by this social account is no longer alive. For people who might be close to the person who just passed away, the experience might be therapeutic. This space is an area waiting to be explored in terms of how designers can help generate support for grieving friends and family and help them overcome it.
This problem, however, goes way beyond the surface level interactions. There is an urgency created to design a new framework that would help us answer questions related to the account data and how it might be handled. Carl J. Öhman and David Watson in their study shed light on a future where the sudden destruction of social media could hold severe ethical concerns.
“Facebook is merely an example of what awaits any platform with similar connectivity and global reach. Furthermore, the sudden dissolution of Facebook would arguably make the subject even more important, as the company may be forced to sell or delete their user data.” (Öhman,Watson, 2004)
Even though there might be uncertainty as to which social media platform will stand the test of time, there is a need of designing sustainable and humane platforms for the future. Companies would be facing the difficult question of which data should be archived and preserved soon. They would have to decide what’s worth saving in terms of business, sentimental, cultural, and religious value. A paper published by Micheal Massimi and Andrea Charise titled “Dying, Death, and Mortality: Towards Thanatosensitivity in HCI” encourages the concept of thanatosensitivity in emerging technologies.
“Thanatosensitivity is a a novel, humanistically-grounded approach to HCI research and design that recognizes and actively engages with the facts of mortality, dying, and death in the creation of interactive systems”
There are a handful of such Thanosensitive designs that I would like to highlight.
Github — Successor settings
From May 2020, Github has deployed a new feature to set your account successor. According to Github, by setting a trusted user to manage your open source projects, you would be able to ensure the future of your work in an event of an untimely death. For a successor to claim the ownership of the repository, the successor needs to present a death certificate or an obituary. Successors have the permission to archive, transfer their predecessor’s public repository to their own or transfer the repository to an organization. I believe that the feature could not have found a more apt time to be released. The functionality that this feature provides is great in terms of building the community of shared work and continuity of the project. The feature has been met with positive reviews overall. Although this feature might work in the context of a repository, it lacks the sentimental aspect of design needed if it’s applied to a social media platform.
Ambient traces by Jessica Charlesworth
This collection of designed memorial objects perfectly capture the feeling of memories of a loved one who passed away. What draws me to this project is how the kit is designed to facilitate setting up new rituals to support people experiencing grief and help them with their healing process. The collection heavily relies on physical artifacts to which calls in our senses to evoke a greater sense of connection. The project consists of a death mask of a loved one which can leave a trace on a bereaver’s pillow. The olfactory humidifier is designed to appeal to our sense of smell and remind us of the memory of a loved one by emitting a familiar fragrance. The memory radio is an artifact that interests me particularly. It blends in elements of digital and physical to create an artifact that could be used for reflection. A memory of a loved one can be recorded and manifested in a 3D printed waveform of the sound. The memory radio can be used to play several of such 3D printed recordings. This project perfectly realizes how important artifacts are during the grieving process and for use after for reflection. People feel closer to the ones they have lost when they have some physical artifacts to interact with. This project has inspired me greatly and helps me realize how artifacts can play a role in creating physical ambiance traces. If one were to create a digital design for bereavement, they should study these artifacts and the principles behind them to apply it in their design.
Facebook Memories
Two years ago, Facebook rolled out this new feature that would allow you to interact with previous interactions on social media in a celebratory manner. People can see how long they have been friends together on Facebook through a short recap video. Facebook understands that not all memories would be pleasant. It provides user control through filters for dates and people. Facebook also goes the extra mile to filter out images automatically based on certain keywords and reactions. Facebook wants to keep it’s platform generally on the positive side which shows why they take extra steps to remove negative posts from their platform. This feature as of today has been adapted to various products such as Google Photos, Snapchat, and Instagram. With a long term interaction with a platform, it’s inevitable to see features like these being implemented. I am interested to see how this feature will be adapted to address the rise of legacy accounts. Photos and memories can become a great tool for reflection and re-visitation but implementing this on a large-scale social media platform comes with its Caveat.
With technology constantly moving towards mediated experience, I aim to explore how the same can be also applied to bereavement. With social media giants slowly embracing reflection and remembrance as a key part of their platform. Thanatosensitive design has a stronger case than ever. However, there is still work that needs to be done in this field. There are new guidelines, policies, and interactions that companies need to take into consideration so that they towards a more sustainable future while catering to the socio-cultural norms and sentimental values of the user.
Citations
Öhman, C. J., & Watson, D. (2019). Are the dead taking over Facebook? A Big Data approach to the future of death online. Big Data & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951719842540
Massimi, Michael & Odom, Will & Kirk, David & Banks, Richard. (2010). HCI at the end of life: Understanding death, dying, and the digital. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems — Proceedings. 4477–4480. 10.1145/1753846.1754178.
Michael Massimi and Andrea Charise. 2009. Dying, death, and mortality: towards thanatosensitivity in HCI. In CHI ’09 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ‘09). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2459–2468. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/1520340.1520349
Jessica Charlesworth. MeMo Credits. Retrieved September 25, 2020, from http://www.me-mo.co/
Jessica Charlesworth. 2013. ambient traces. (April 2013). Retrieved September 25, 2020, from https://www.designboom.com/project/ambient-traces/
