Reciprocity, Deep Storage,
and Letting Go: Opportunities
for Designing Interactions with
Inherited Digital Materials
William Odom

Carnegie Mellon University | [e-mail]

Richard Banks

Microsoft Research | [e-mail]

Dave Kirk

University of Nottingham | [e-mail]

 

We are seeing a vast proliferation of self-generated content on the Internet. From ever-expanding online photo archives to mundane records of everyday life through tweets, blog posts, and status updates, new forms of digital content that people find deeply meaningful and may want to pass down one day are being created. On the one hand, digital suggests possibilities of permanence and new modes of presence and expression for these kinds of materials. On the other, it brings into question what we would want to preserve and who should make those decisions. These issues come at a time when we are moving beyond the point at which digital content is constrained to a particular generation, raising further issues about how the digital residue of a person’s life could become the property of someone else and be representative of a person after they have passed on.

Despite these shifts, little is
being done to consider the means
by which our digital remains will
persist after we are gone. For
example, deceased users’ social
networking Web pages typically
persist after their passing, often
without measures in place to
appropriately handle this con-
tent [ 1]. In general there are few
mechanisms to enable people
to pass digital content to loved
ones, whether stored locally
or in the cloud. These techno-
logical trends compel interaction
designers to consider how digital
possessions and archives will be
handled as we begin to consider
the implications of their per-
sistence beyond the lives of the
original owners.

 

Designing for Experiences of Reciprocity Across Exchanges A series of complications emerged for people during the reception—and subsequent maintenance—of digital materials from the departed. One of the most pervasive problems centered on people being unable to make sense of large collections of inherited digital data. While bequeathed physical objects were generally regarded as manageable, the vast amount of unfiltered content on even a single digital device often raised troubling concerns. In some cases, participants inadvertently stumbled upon content not

[ 1] Recently, Facebook has included a “memorial” feature for users’ homepages. Nonetheless, many problems remain, such as users being reminded to “recon-nect” with deceased friends. See Ortutay. B. “Facebook to Memorialize Deceased User Profiles.” The Globe and Mail, 27 October 2009; http:// www.theglobeandmail. com/news/technology/ facebook-to-memorial-ize-deceased-user-pro- files/article1339899/ [ 2] For a more in-depth description of findings from our field research, see: Odom, W. Harper, R., Sellen, A., Kirk, D., and Banks, R. “Passing On and Putting to Rest: Understanding Bereavement in the Context of Interactive Technologies,” 1831–1840. In Proc. of CHI ’ 10. New York: ACM Press, 2010.

September + October 2010