Extended Abstract
Coping with Death via Data Legacies: Focus Groups and a Literature Review
A digital legacy is the sum total of all the digital information that exists about you after your death. Under the mentorship of Henrike Weingärtner at LMU Munich, I conducted two focus groups with people ages 18-35, asking the question: How can we represent a person’s digital legacy, keeping in mind the preferences of the person and the loved ones they leave behind?
I’m currently conducting a literature review of related research in HCI, focusing on digital legacy prototypes that use current technology to present a deceased person’s data and help their loved ones grieve. Some really interesting projects include Fenestra, a Japanese Buddhist photo shrine, and ReFind, a photo album search tool. These tools help “ongoingness” or keeping a deceased person present in someone’s life, a method that has shown to significantly assist the grieving process.
Using data from previous literature as well as the focus groups, I hope to develop a framework to understand the range of technological interventions to represent digital legacies and identify future areas of development and design. What are data types that are not being utilized? Are there opportunities for generative AI tools?