My team and I were primarily interested in the digital lives of the dead and their digital legacies. We began our research by structuring the ecosystem of the dead into four phases, the Living, the Grieving, the Planning and the Leaving. With how much of our lives we live online, there is an underwhelming lack of thought for the concept of a digital legacy. At this stage, we want to begin more conversations and ask more critical questions about designing long term solutions from the preneed to the post-mortem. What do we want to leave behind in our own digital accounts? And how could you know what someone who’s passed away would have wanted? We unpack deeper questions through this section.

We began our discussion of the problem space with some of the big social questions that the pandemic had exposed. The first area we discussed was on the relationship that people had with their digital presence. The second was on the different public perceptions people had about death and their associations. These ideas, though disconnected when we first started researching, brought up more critical questions about the digital lives of the dead.

1 — Digital presence

The months following the most intense periods of the lockdown, millions of thoughts flooded chat rooms, and people were living very different strings of reality online. During this time, I theorised the concept of Noise. The content we consume sometimes acts only as visual or audible noise and mental clutter. The Social Dilemma warns us of the mental and emotional harm that mindless consumption of media can have. The impressionable are more at risk to the dangers of fake news, cat-fishing, advertisement traps, or the addiction to the infinite scroll. Noise is a click bait into hours of your time feeding information about yourself to AI algorithms without getting much in return. As our relationship with technology grows and changes, how do we instil values deeper than the pockets of billionaires? How do we create a culture more sincere than engagement for engagement's sake? Social media has a short memory and the Noise that fills our time robs us of opportunities to give value and purpose to our digital selves. To speak broadly, there are a few questions being raised. How do we reduce the Noise on the internet, and how do we teach our individual versions of the internet to be a place of greater substance for us?

2 — Perceptions about death

Death could look like burying your first pet hamster in the backyard next to the flowers. Death could look like a celebration with colours and flower garlands and a public parade down the streets. Death could look like wearing black, burning joss sticks and lighting incense candles; reciting prayers and standing in an appropriate position based on lineage. Honouring the dead could have huge differences in interpretations based on culture, belief systems, age or prior experiences with death. The public perceptions of practices around death and how to talk about death can be a sensitive topic for the living. Especially for the young, we often take for granted that death has no deadline and does not necessarily follow our plans. On a regular basis, it's normal not to consider our mortality within every mundane task or responsibility we have. Death is not a contributing factor to deciding where I'm going to eat tonight or what I post on social media. However, when death decides to make changes, it can be a powerful impetus for personal reflection.

In the year of the lockdown during the pandemic, we were forced to face mortality on a daily basis. Our thoughtless consumption of Noise was an escape from the drastic changes and ugly realities of the new normal. Taking a critical lens to our online behaviours, how has the gravity of the pandemic affected our media consumption? When bad news was never followed by good news, many of us opted out of news media entirely. The tone of our online communities influenced our outlook on the world and became a reflection of the values we hold. What we choose to put online and the narrative we craft for ourselves is also a reflection of our persona. How does facing our mortality influence what we choose to consume and contribute? And if your social media accounts were all that was left of your personality today, would that representation be the one you wish to leave in your legacy?

We began to look at circumstances of handling death online. During the pandemic, memorials and funeral ceremonies were planned and executed virtually, a novel experience for most people. This came with adapting our traditions and customs and managing grief online.

When the online ceremonies were our only options, sentiments toward them may have been biassed. However, two years earlier in 2017, a survey was conducted and 54% of participants said watching a live-stream of a funeral would be insensitive or morbid. 40% did not believe virtual funerals would capture the emotions and sentiment of being there in person. As the pandemic has taught us, there is an irreplaceable quality of gathering in person. That intangible quality of coming together helps us be present in the moment to observe respect and appropriate courtesies of the commemoration. Additionally, 27% felt that they wouldn’t be able to grieve or process their grief in the same way. Virtual ceremonies don't allow for the quiet passing of condolences or a reassuring squeeze of your arm. The little moments that silently create the mood in the room. Appropriate social étiquettes and emotions are best conveyed in the physical presence of each other. Although we have genuine intentions and try to convey them as best as possible online, our grief also manifests in ways that are unnatural in the digital world. If given no other option, is our best option to adapt to successfully navigating our social situations online? How can virtual funeral facilitators better our experience of expressing grief online?

We widened our research scope from instances of death online to the planning for pre and post death. We first looked into planning by setting affairs in order which included understanding what assets and possessions could be included in wills. This then opened up more questions to what the rights of the deceased are and the risks they may possess.

Funerals help us pay respects to our loved ones and give us time to process our grief. Besides addressing our physical beings and our emotions, we are reliant on loved ones to be responsible for our worldly possessions. Writing a will helps to allocate your possessions according to your wishes. A will is a process that can begin at any stage of life, although usually begins when one has a larger estate or children to pass it down to. The idea is fairly straightforward for physical possessions but what about our digital assets? Digital assets is a broad term. According to Nolo, “A general rule is that all digital assets that you own and that have a monetary or tangible value will be included in your estate when you die. You can use your will to determine who will get such digital assets”. These digital assets include for example, funds in PayPal accounts, funds owed to you by an online store like Amazon or Etsy, Bitcoin, digital music or photos that you own and store on your computer's hard drive, or even frequent flyer miles (depending on the policy of the issuing company). However, there are some digital assets that will almost certainly not be included. These being your email and social media accounts, domains that you've licensed, subscription accounts like Netflix or Spotify, and tax or financial software. This realisation introduced an opportunity for designing for the digital lives of the dead. What actually happens to our digital presence after we die? (Digital presence being defined as assets of sentimental value not included in wills.) For example, how would a social media platform know that Grandma had passed on? What if Grandma never wrote down her passwords, or what if it was one of 26 different variations that we’ll never crack? Furthermore, if we could get into the account, what do we do with the content?

Our research continued to look into the rights of the deceased, and the privacy and security of their data not transferable in a will. We found that for private accounts like social media, “Ownership of those accounts is controlled by the user rules and regulations of the site in question. A typical rule is that the site deletes inactive accounts after death, the account exists and is still “owned” by the deceased person”. As predicted, the account is still in the name of the deceased and access solely relies on whether they passed on their passwords to a trusted person. “In the end, it doesn't matter if someone is dead or alive – accessing his or her account without permission is illegal”. These ghost accounts are not able to be passed on by legal definition, but neither do they disappear or are disabled immediately. This leaves at best, a few months of idle time where no one takes responsibility for the account. While this is usually not a big deal, the biggest risk we found was identity fraud. “Inactive accounts of dead users have been targeted by hackers, and cybersecurity firm NortonLifeLock found that nearly 500 million consumers across 10 countries have been victims of a cybercrime, and 350 million of these crimes took place in 2019 alone”.

These findings gave us great insight into understanding more about the digital lives of the dead. From here, we wanted to inquire further about whether people actually attempted to save their social media accounts, emails or other documented memories, and how they managed all the content of sentimental value. The biggest risks seem to come after death when the owner of the accounts can no longer give permission. We began to understand how difficult it would be to retrieve that information, especially for death in unforeseen circumstances, and what could legally be done with the data.

Now that we have built a base picture of our digital lives and our experiences with death in the living, grieving and planning stages, we continue to ask more about what happens to the accounts of the dead if they are left unsupervised? We were curious about the level of control that users want over their digital lives pre-death, and if left to a loved one post-death, who the users would trust to tell their story.

We know that ghost accounts face individual risk of identity fraud, but what about collective risks? 1 email, all text and no media attachments, is about 4 grams of carbon. Now picture your entire inbox, and if you have multiple emails, add on each social media account and all the posts you've posted, every tab you’ve left open for a week, all cloud services that you may use, and any other internet habits you have. “A study by the Boston Consulting Group found that the internet is responsible for around 1 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year. That’s about 2% of total emissions”, roughly the same amount of carbon emissions as the aviation industry for comparison. After we die, all of our possessions and our physical being is allowed to stop, to rest. But for every account that is left unmanaged, our digital presence still contributes to the carbon emissions of the internet. Multiply a single person’s digital presence by the hundreds of thousands that we lose on a regular day. That could add up to a large amount of carbon sitting idly, being produced for no purpose. So who is cleaning up the internet? How much digital Noise exists because they've become inaccessible?

Moreover, not all that is lost is Noise. Some of the data that remains unmanaged or locked up in dead accounts could hold sentimental or even unknown monetary value to the living. While Grandma’s shaky film photos may not have been of much value to the general public, they could hold deep value to her family. That memory is not Noise, but a piece in time worth keeping. In a survey, participants were asked the question, “Would you want to set up your own virtual memorial before your death so that you can control the content or after your death, where someone else controls the content?” The majority, 59.4% responded “before their death” and 37.5% responded “after” with 1 (3.1%) not responding. As the importance of a digital legacy grows, either through virtual worlds or social networking sites, users may want or need to have more control and input on the digital artefacts that represent them after their death. This raises yet another risk to digital legacies. The rapid development of technology means that older technology becomes obsolete, from file type obsolescence to the physical life of storage drives. Within my lifetime, we’ve gone from floppy discs and 8-bit screens to a functioning metaverse of 3D avatars. Preserving heritage of digital selves already have much broader capabilities and take on various forms. How can we create better systems of preserving what is of value to us and our future generations?

In looking at the policies of various social media we learnt about ways that companies are currently managing their load of ghost accounts. When an account owner has passed, protocols regarding ownership and privacy differ in two ways. Some social platforms allow family to gain access with an appeal, while others do not transfer access at all. Also, platform have different levels of action taken from complete deletion of content, to disabling accounts after inactivity, to preserving content. These two factors make up the 2 by 2 matrix for the current post-mortem solutions. Through the major media platforms we looked into, we identified a market gap in a platform that prioritises memorialisation and giving family access.

What if we wanted a plan to pass our digital assets down while we are in the preneed phase? We researched some preneed solutions, though none have as large a user base as social media platforms. DeadSocial and Gone Not Gone are services that primarily collect messages from loved ones for the memorial. They involve social contacts well, but don't account for the existing digital assets of the dead. We found Here After and After Note which are services that place more importance on crafting a timeline of memories and wishes to be preserved. Lastly, we have Digital Legacy Management and the Digital Legacy Association who provide resources, spread the word and help to preserve digital assets.

We placed these solutions for planning, along with social media and having an assigned person to manage the accounts on a 2 by 2 matrix. It evaluated the ability of these platforms to host a digital legacy from the preneed to the post-mortem. It also specified the level of access of these services provide from allowing the public outsider to view and/or add to it, to an inside family member. It makes sense that most services now are targeted toward helping the preneed market segment plan by themselves what their legacy should hold. This gives some opportunity to design for the preneed space in a more collaborative way. It also reveals greater opportunity to place emphasis and care on the post-mortem capabilities of digital legacies.

Through our research findings up to this point, we chose to define our primary target audience as the Preneed market, and Post-mortem being the secondary focus. We want to design for providing relief, to the eventual deceased and the ones who love them. We were most compelled by a few research insights to drive the project. These includes wanting to preserve memories for the living, to reduce the carbon footprint of the internet by reducing noise, we want to spark meaningful conversations, and we want digital legacies to be accessible and shareable.

We conducted 2 surveys. The first was on Digital Life with 112 participants, and the second was on Attitudes and Sensitivities of Death with 213 participants. Both surveys had respondents that were 18 and older reaching late 70s; both had the 18 to 24 year old age range making up more than 70% of respondents.

The goal of the first survey was to understand users behaviours online and their thoughts on a digital legacy. We wanted to get a quantitative view of the general awareness and demand for digital legacies. We asked, “Have you thought about what will happen to your digital accounts when you die?”, of which the majority, 69.4% said no and the other 30.6% said yes. About 7 out of every 10 people have not thought about it, showing a lack of public awareness.

Following that, on a 5 point likert scale, we asked participants to rank if they would want a digital legacy with 1 being “not at all” and 5 being a “yes!”. 85.2% or 95 participants answered a 3 or higher, and 37 of them responded with a 3 being the most common answer. While most people remain on the fence and don't know if they would want a digital legacy, it is expected that these users who are majority below 24 years old and have not thought about their digital legacies don’t know that they would want one when asked.

The goal of the second survey was to understand users' attitudes to the subject of death and learn about their interactions with digital legacies. 197 of 213 respondents indicated that they had been to a funeral before, ranging from attending “1” to “more than 8” different funerals. We structured their subsequent questions about their experience with death based on the question, “Do you know anyone that has died in the last 5 years?”. (18.3%) 39 people answered “Yes, one person”, (9.4%) 20 answered “No”, and (72.3%) 154 people answered “Yes, more than one person”.

From the large number of people knowing more than one person who has passed, we speculate that the pandemic has affected these results greatly. 77.9% of those respondents indicated that they know 2-5 people that have passed while the other 22.1% know 6 or more people. With such extensive experience with death, we asked the question, “Have you found that the grieving process has gotten easier or harder each time you experience it?”. There was a balanced split in the results with the majority neither feeling it getting easier, nor more difficult. In reflection, this question does not take into account the relationship with those who've passed and the gravity of the passing on them which could explain the result. We can also say that grief looks different each time and grieving a person is an individual process instead of cumulative for most people.

Lastly, from all survey participants, 53.1% said that they are currently friends with or following someone on social media who has passed away. Of those who responded yes, 35.8% never visit their account and 41.5% visit yearly. To look back at memories, the majority would use digital platforms like personal photos, facebook, instagram, snapchat, twitter, or a combination of the listed. For most, the extent of their interaction with a digital legacy is nothing at all. Of the 126 respondents to this section, only 14 people have posted a comment on their page once, and 17 having commented more than once.

There is a huge diversity in experience and attitudes toward digital legacies. Often people's perceptions are not shaped by age but by their depth of experience. We learnt that experiences with death are not that uncommon. However, the extent of grief and interactions with digital memorabilia are not dependent on how many people they have known to pass but based on external reasons such as individual relationships with the person who has passed.

We conducted 2 expert interviews. We spoke for an hour to User Experience Designer at Florida Blue Insurance, Erin Imhof, and a 30 minute interview with Senior Partner at the Law Firm of Williams & Pine, LLC, Mr Wallace J. Williams.

Blue Insurance has many clients who require end-of-life care. Ms Erin Imhof interviews and speaks with these clients directly and was able to share with us her insight to attitudes toward death. In her work to design for death, she advises to “Focus on the benefits, rather than the risks”. The reality of discussing your mortality could be a morbid or sensitive topic. She explains that it's courteous to send the interview questions ahead of time, to help her interviewees feel prepared for what's asked of them. During interviews, it's important to be empathetic to their situations and emotions. Focusing on safety, security and protection to always put the best interest of the user at the heart can help them open up as well. Those would grow to be key values that guide design decisions for a digital legacy. She says, “End of life planning is not about you, it’s about your family”. She provides perspective to how she frames her duty to those, that by that stage of life, have the general sentiment to place the importance on family members. Speaking with Ms Imhof helped us better prepare ourselves for the conversations about death we were about to embark on.

Our second expert interview was shorter but gave us huge value to understanding digital legacies. Mr Wallace Williams is a probate attorney who aids in writing and legitimising wills. “People come into my office to write a will, and they will have a list of assets they want to give away. That is like going to the doctor and asking for a prescription before telling them your symptoms”, Mr Williams says to give us perspective to his job. The assumptions that people make about wills are that they are solely about the estate, when really they are about the relationships. To navigate the process of creating a will, it comes with handling the sensitivities of people considering their livelihoods and wellbeing. He mentions that experience can motivate users to create a will. When it came to managing the assets, the insights he provided both validated and clarified how legalities affect digital legacies. He was able to confirm with us that non-monetary assets can be considered intellectual property which can be accommodated for in a will. Additionally, even when digital property is probated, it might not be able to surpass company privacy policies. Though a relatively stringent sounding man, he got fired up sharing his frustrations about a previous case where they were unable to help his clients retrieve information and data from an Apple account after the owner of the account passed on. While this call with Mr Williams was highly insightful, we wished for more time as he prompted further questions we had about intellectual property ownership and privacy rights, as well as the human impacts.

Over our 2 weeks of preparing and conducting primary research, we had 11 user interview participants. Our goal for the interviews was to inquire about the various stages of the digital ecosystem of the dead. We wanted to understand grief in the digital space, attitudes towards managing digital legacies, and wishes for the users own digital legacy.

We wrote our interview guide to cover the areas of the digital ecosystem of the dead in a structure that we wanted to guide our interviews in. 1 — We started with building an idea of their Digital presence. We wanted to understand the user’s support system, their perceptions on their own digital presence, and willingness to have a digital legacy. 2 — Once we initiated the relationship, we asked about the Preneed phase which was about their wishes for themselves, digital privacy, digital life span, and trusted contacts to pass access down to. 3 — That led more smoothly into inquiring about their thoughts on their Post-mortem digital life. We discussed what it felt like to grieve in a digital memorial and about how they would feel managing a loved one’s digital legacy. 4 — Lastly, we took a more reflective tone to ask about the Benefits of Planning. We discussed the user’s mental model of a digital will. User’s then weighed the benefits and risks of planning their digital legacy versus leaving their story to be told by someone they chose.

From our 11 user interviews and all other research methods we conducted, we pulled 820 individual raw data points that lived on our Miro board. From there, we started our affinitization process to create 174 themes, and 51 high level insights from our users. To define the problem space and create actionable steps, we created 22 How Might We questions to define and direct the design problem.

During our interviews, we were lucky to have spoken to people who shared openly and deeply about their experiences with death and digital legacies. They brought the human experience to the centre of our research. All the risks, legal constraints or assumptions we had before became side pieces to their emotional attachments to their people.