Digital Legacy
Our data embeds our identity, our history, and our memory. Digital technology has created the possibility for data embedding experience to persist beyond a user’s lifetime. However, digital tools have made memories harder to hold. Considering the vulnerability associated with aging and cognitive decline, this project addresses the infrastructure of digital legacy and memory data.
The Digital Legacy project is a design approach to infrastructure digital legacy with greater intentionality and to provide tools for people reflect on the past. In this system, all data about the self can be a source of memories. Users can securely interact with their memory data to categorize, compress, synthesize, and distribute their legacy with their privacy and access preferences in mind.
With contemporary electronic devices, people could theoretically remember anything with the click of a button. But the reality is: relying on digital tools has made memories harder to hold. Memory recall becomes even more of an issue for people experiencing cognitive decline or dementia. The ability for people to share their lives and identities through digital technology has created the possibility for experience to persist beyond the lifetime of the user. With populations aging worldwide and digital amnesia on the rise, design must consider how digital experience supports memory making, legacy generation, and data distribution.
Context
Solution
People choose to remember moments which hold significance to their life as a whole. They modify or rearrange those chosen moments as their perspective changes such that memories become blurred, compressed, and abbreviated based on time passed, who the memory is shared with, and how embodied mediums age. The digital legacy experience seeks to adapt human behavior to digital information in order to preserve privacy, provenance, and, ultimately, to reduce the cognitive burden of defining a legacy.
The digital experience takes memory data, either collected from personal electronics or wearable devices, processes the data through the legacy infrastructure, and creates interactive data representations over time. Memories are "captured" through collecting user-approved data such as images, videos, or even bio-signals. The memories are then categorized by sentiment, ML-recognized people or objects, and other factors significant to the user.
Next is recollection where memories are resurfaced throughout the user's life to update the importance and qualities of a memory over time. Memories that grow in significance are recollected more frequently, while ones that reduce in significance are shown less frequently. The frequency by which memories are resurfaced to the user could mimic spaced repetition systems (SRS), used by language learning systems, to help people remember their most valued memories. The frequency may also help with users working through traumatic memories that may benefit from memory reconsolidation as directed by a mental health professional.
When memories are surfaced during the recollection phase, the cumulative legacy becomes crystallized through the compression of the multiple memory objects into one. In other words, it becomes a digital equivalent of a personal time capsule. Users can then share their legacy like an heirloom, but in multiple ways. Because the digital legacy is now composed of organized data, it can be filtered based on the receiving party.
Legacies can be distributed to external parties such as healthcare providers to support medical research, estate planning to distribute assets among beneficiaries, organizations to commemorate culture or archive institutional knowledge, and loved ones who inherit intimate information. The legacy infrastructure considers the type of information and security access based on user preferences and how those may change after death.
Throughout the experience, users can interact with their legacy as it evolves. Using the visual language of a ginkgo tree, a ginkgo branch could be a living projection in the home to convey the growth and pruning of a user’s legacy where leaves are data visualizations of individual memories. The intent of a projection is to bring data visualization in a living space, similar to how a child’s height is marked on a door jamb year over year.
Impact
The Memiro Digital Legacy proposes an algorithmic framework for memory technology that allows people to take control of their digital legacy with minimal cognitive effort. The project connects the missing attributes of physical heirlooms to digital memories through new forms of interaction. This has the potential to not only help people remember their recent memories, but to improve memory care during aging and at the end of life.
This project provides the structure on which to develop memory-sensitive technologies. The immersive experience of one's own memory data may help users develop better understanding of their life and legacy as it's developing.
If the technology were expanded, the data processing could be implemented through blockchain that encrypts data, converts to semantic hashing, and creates an immutable record. Additionally, AI-generated images enables people to create stylized versions of their memories to convey context while preserving anonymity. The simplicity of sharing a legacy has the potential to enhance estate planning and inheritance processes. Taking a memory-sensitive perspective to technology will lead to greater care and attention toward gerontological and cognitive issues.
