Digital Remains: Design Research
Context:
Methods & Deliverables:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The background thinking and design research for Digital Remains covered several months of my 2nd year at the Royal College of Art and it was a combination of interviews, reading, drawing, physical sketching, filming and process design. Traditionally, our mourning rituals use places (grave yards, places of contemplation, places of joint memory, etc.), time (anniversaries, seasons, etc.) and objects (photographs, objects that belonged to the deceised, etc.) as links to our feelings and memories related to our deceased loved-ones. Since we have begun to create massive amounts of digital content which also includes personal digital content, our ancestors will not find photoalbums and diaries in old wooden trunks in our attics but will find them as data on old computers, hard drives, mobile phones, web pages and social media sites. This is not bad or regrettable (we will not stop creating tangible things too), it is simply a change in tools and behaviours. The only thing we might want to consider is whether we want to pay more attention and care to the design and meaning of data and its containers. I conducted several interviews in order to examine how we mourn, which ‘links’ we use for mourning and which role digital data is increasingly playing in our mourning rituals. In this qualitative, anecdotical research, I found that the younger the people I spoke to were, the more prominent digital content became for remembering loved-ones. The relevance of digital content as link to a deceased loved-one was as high as rituals around places, time and objects were. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Design Research for Digital Remains |