Process

Meeting for the first time, we spent an hour just talking about death and what we found interesting about the way people are memorialized today. From this meeting, we talked about what it means to represent those who have died in a living context, where remembering takes place, and the dystopian, ill-considered consequences that may come from creating a digital avatar that lives on following death. Those who give themselves this power become Frankensteins of sorts, creating monsters from the digital collages they reanimate.

From this discussion, we settled on the idea of a booth that is situated in no particular place, but can instead create its own self-contained environment specially designed for remembering and engaging with the dead. We originally created a circle of screens because we imagined a user calling back an entire collective of their lost at a time. While we moved away from that idea for the purposes of our prototype and demonstration, the circular main space remained. Imagining it would be startling to move straight from the city into an emotionally intense communication with the dead, we added meditation pods to the front and back of our experience flow, giving the individual time to rest, calm and remove themselves from the concerns of the outside world. Similarly, when exiting the experience, moving from a real interaction with a much loved deceased family member or friend immediately into the world would be jarring and diminish the importance of the interaction that just took place. A second meditative experience provides built in space to decompress, reflect and prepare for reentry back into the world.

Imagining our booths already placed throughout NYC and in use a decade from now, back casting forced us to consider the practicalities of our memorialized solution. The technology we are proposing may seem advanced, but all of the components are in fact already in place and in active use, for many of the same purposes. Eye tracking and motion aware software is not difficult to access, and is being used widely in video games today. Natural language processing technology is developing quickly as AI develops. And, as mentioned previously, image and personality reconstruction are already happening. The societal and cultural hunger for and openness to new places and ways to mourn is here as well. Honestly, the booths could pop up today, with the right funding and a company interested in advocating for their inclusion. The biggest hurdle for making a booth like this reality are the legal issues around the use of a person’s likeness following death. What rights the dead do and don’t have will no doubt be a major legislative question in the next ten years, as the use and reuse of the dead becomes more possible and more common.

Assured our idea is founded in ground truths, we moved into layout out the particulars of the physical space, points of interaction, and emotional journey a user will flow through with hybrid space maps and experience mapping.