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Dealing with death in design: developing systems for the bereaved

Published: 07 May 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Increasingly, systems are being developed and used in ways that involve end of life issues such as death, dying, and bereavement. Yet design considerations and guidelines for technologists working in this sensitive area are not well-established. We therefore report on exploratory fieldwork consisting of focus groups, observations, and consultation with bereavement experts aimed at understanding how technology might be designed to support bereaved parents. From this fieldwork, we derive a set of considerations useful for researchers and designers developing systems that deal specifically with bereavement, and with the end of life more broadly. These considerations focus on interpersonal communication, new ways of being in the world, and materiality. We conclude with a distillation of these considerations into practical design guidelines for working in this area.

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  • (2024)Materialising affective experiences: Designing for personal domestic grief practicesProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3660753(685-698)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Maintaining Continuing Bonds in Bereavement: A Participatory Design Process of Be.sideProceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642386(1-15)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)New Understandings of Loss: Examining the Role of Reflective Technology Within Bereavement and Meaning-MakingProceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3641968(1-15)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '11: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    May 2011
    3530 pages
    ISBN:9781450302289
    DOI:10.1145/1978942
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 07 May 2011

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    Author Tags

    1. bereavement
    2. death
    3. design
    4. dying
    5. memory
    6. social support
    7. thanatosensitive design

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    CHI '11 Paper Acceptance Rate 410 of 1,532 submissions, 27%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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    Cited By

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    • (2024)Materialising affective experiences: Designing for personal domestic grief practicesProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3660753(685-698)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
    • (2024)Maintaining Continuing Bonds in Bereavement: A Participatory Design Process of Be.sideProceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642386(1-15)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2024)New Understandings of Loss: Examining the Role of Reflective Technology Within Bereavement and Meaning-MakingProceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3641968(1-15)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2024)“It’s Like Living a Different Life, Going to the Moon”: Rethinking Space and Activity in the Context of COVID-19Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)10.1007/s10606-024-09493-yOnline publication date: 24-May-2024
    • (2024)Activism Across the Generations—An AwakeningThe Disappeared10.1007/978-3-031-64713-0_5(51-75)Online publication date: 3-Sep-2024
    • (2023)Living Memories: AI-Generated Characters as Digital MementosProceedings of the 28th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces10.1145/3581641.3584065(889-901)Online publication date: 27-Mar-2023
    • (2023)How Bereaved Parents Make Meaning from Photos for Continuing BondsProceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3563657.3596071(1032-1046)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2023
    • (2023)Dying, Death, and the Afterlife in Human-Computer Interaction. A Scoping Review.Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581199(1-16)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
    • (2023)Zukunftsperspektiven auf Sterben, Tod und TrauerSchmerzmedizin10.1007/s00940-023-4163-839:3(70-73)Online publication date: 22-May-2023
    • (2023)Information science and the inevitable: A literature review at the intersection of death and information managementJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/asi.24861Online publication date: 28-Dec-2023
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