Doing a session tomorrow on Postmortem Design - actually designing to protect the legacy of users after they pass away.
I'm prepping my slides and I'm already crying. So much data getting lost and so hard for families to access it.
I'm using my grandma's attic as a backdrop. I used to love heading up there and discovering old photos, letters, stamps, coins and memorabilia each with its own story.
Now who owns everyone's attic… do our digital legacies matter and if so, who should own it and access it…
@axbom A friend of mine died suddenly in his sleep a few years ago.
He still has a Facebook profile. Bots tag him in all sorts of shit. People - and bots - wish him a happy birthday every year. His family tried to get FB to take it down because it was hard to look at, but couldn't get through to them.
@axbom Been there with my dad, I handled the "digital estate" for mom after he died. He had no online presence to speak of, so it was mostly about taking over the email inbox and using that to cancel subscriptions, delete accounts, etc. Not every site was accommodating and it took a year of piece by piece labor.
I'm curious what designers can do better. I know of Facebook's and Google's systems to inherit data, but having to have a pre-existing account on every service is clearly not practical.
@julian Thank you for sharing. This is my experience as well... at least a year of sorting things out.
One of my takeaways is that online platforms will have lots of settings for memorializing accounts or deleting them completely. But they aren’t going to teach you how to download your content and make it available to your family in a sensible way.
It will actually be an open discussion as part of the session, what are designers' responsibilities. I'm also thinking of books, music, playlists that are likely to get lost…
People have of course been talking about these things for a long time but I don't see any clear answers.
Designers at least carry much of the weight of consent, information and communication. My reflection is that this can generally be done in a much better and more proactive way. And assume responsibility and talking about it more openly is a step forward.
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