Post-mortem digital legacy: Possibilities in HCI

Abstract

As designers and stakeholders attentive to HCI issues, it is paramount to understand questions such as death and post-mortem digital legacy and how they affect systems development. This paper presents current discussions about that topic, by presenting a brief overview of what has been produced by the HCI community on death and digital legacy and some of the solutions created to address those phenomena. Such solutions include adaptations to already-existing tools, such as Facebook and its memorial profiles, as well as the creation of new tools for the domain of death, such as social networks for dead people’s profiles. However, the implementation of those technologies demand further studies on the differences between law systems and belief systems regarding death and what can be considered either universal or particular in the understanding of death. Therefore, there is an urge for more interdisciplinary studies on this topic, so as to bring to HCI discussions different perspectives, theories and methods that can be used in the study of death.