Digital memorialising: A concept for a digital memorial service in Finland

Abstract

As technology has made a massive amount of information available about deceased persons, there have been a great number of studies about how to integrate digital data into mourning practices and how to utilise technology for bringing new perspectives to memorial design. Some studies suggest that there is a gap between digital and traditional memorialising practices. Attempts have been made to remove this gap by utilising holographic and RFID readers, wireless sensors, and other various means. However, these technologies are not currently as widely adapted in our daily life as web technology. The final concepts of this study rely only on existing web technologies to build a digital memorial service that has the potential to be widely used and to bridge the gap between digital and physical worlds. As different mourning patterns exist in different cultures, the cultural differences—in addition to the differences in available technologies—should be taken into account when designing a digital memorial service. The Finnish population provides a suitably compact target group to narrow the scope for this study, which is in part cultural. In addition, the concept provided in this thesis documents the life stories of the deceased in order to meet their needs of being remembered after death. Therefore, the objective of this study is to provide a digital memorial concept that bridges the gap between digital and physical worlds, while at the same time documenting the life stories of the deceased by utilising web technologies for a specific culture, namely Finnish culture.

The proposed concept is based on user surveys, semi-structured interviews, and a literature study. In the early stage, two visual concepts were created for a digital memorial in Finland. At the end of their development, the two concepts were evaluated by Finns and the preferred concept was selected. Hopefully, the concepts provided in this thesis will inspire future digital mourning practices.