Technology and the human lifespan: learning from the bereaved

As personal technologies evolve, people continually have new opportunities to capture and share their lives. Mobile phones, Facebook, and Twitter have joined elder forms of communication to form a varied technological landscape. Designers often imagine "blue sky" scenarios, in which the en...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Interactions (New York, N.Y.) N.Y.), 2011-05, Vol.18 (3), p.26-29
Main Author: Massimi, Michael
Format: Magazinearticle
Language:English
Subjects:
Death & dying
Design engineering
Designers
Grief
Human-computer interaction
Studies
Technology adoption
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Summary:As personal technologies evolve, people continually have new opportunities to capture and share their lives. Mobile phones, Facebook, and Twitter have joined elder forms of communication to form a varied technological landscape. Designers often imagine "blue sky" scenarios, in which the envisioned user's life is stable and suffused with health and happiness: a kind of designer's optimism. As technology becomes more personal and intimate, there is a need for increased acknowledgement and accommodation of the ups and downs that occur from birth to death. As a key example, HCI researchers and designers have recently begun to tackle the difficult issue of death. In this article, the authors briefly describe some of the work that they have conducted in this area, with a focus on sharing the stories of the bereaved and their experiences with technology. In so doing, they hope to illustrate the importance of thinking about the entirety of the human lifespan when designing personal technologies.
ISSN:1072-5520
1558-3449
DOI:10.1145/1962438.1962447