On Death and Dying in HCI
I had been meaning for a few weeks to read an alt.chi paper published in the CHI 09 proceedings called ‘Dying, Death, and Mortality: Towards Thanatosensitivity in HCI.’ Written by Michael Massimi and Andrea Charise at the U of Toronto, the title had caught my eye and then a bit of buzz surrounding it really piqued my interest. (Click through the authors’ websites to see the paper.)
The authors address an issue that, frankly, we are steadily marching toward in human-computer interaction. As avid computer users age and older people feel more comfortable on computers, we must face the tricky issue of mortality.
In a world where many of our computing devices and systems come and go at such a pace that we scarcely pause when a beloved tool becomes extinct, planning for a system to outlive a user seems foreign. (The transience of computing systems and in particular devices is an unsustainable trend being studied by many at my Alma Mater Indiana University and elsewhere, and deserves attention in its own right.)
The authors point to the long tradition of written works of the deceased being treasured items by family members, and in some cases, becoming published works and so on. However, in the digital realm, the connection to physical space is dramatically altered or even gone.
Unfortunately, much of the research in this area is difficult. Without research to guide us, we must still attempt to keep a mind toward thanatosensitivity (from the Greek mythological figure of death and mortality) in design.