Enabling Ongoingness: Creating meaningful connections around death and end of life

Ongoingness is a EPSRC funded project and a collaboration between Northumbria University and Open Lab looking at how we can create meaningful connections with people who have passed on or who are at the end of life.

One aim of the project is to find new ways to capture and represent something meaningful about an individual and their relationships through a combination of physical things and digital media (which could mean photographs, music, film clips etc).

We hope to better understand the potential benefits that design and digital technologies can bring to people to offer new ways to:

• Express a sense of who they are in the present, but also for the future
• Make objects and media content that will support other people after one’s death
• Enable people, who are already bereaved, to maintain lasting bonds in new ways with someone who has now died.

The project is called Enabling Ongoingness because the term ongoingness suggests that our relationships with each other, especially the most personally meaningful of these, do not end if someone dies. For many people there is continuity and something that lasts that can be of great comfort and inner support for people when they are bereaved. Rather than thinking of endings, we are championing continued bonds between people in this project and hope to support these for participants and to enable people to think of things that we could all make together not only for now, but also for the future.

Artefacts

There has been a number of artefacts created so far.

Refind - connecting us to the past

Refind gives people a way to re-explore their relationships with deceased loved ones by sharing photos from the present, and receiving media from the past, so we can provide a continuing dialogue with lost loved ones.

A digital locket - creating new meanings around end of life

The digital locket contains precious photos from the person’s family, which can be uploaded at any time. This means family members from across the world can connect with their loved ones, and even upload new photos as a surprise.

Trails - visit places and relive old stories

Trails is a tiny audio artefact that invites the listener to discover stories captured and curated by loved ones with dementia when visiting places that are meaningful for you and your family.

Blueprints - turning physical artefacts into media

Working with a series of fabric collages, we developed a method for translating physical properties of objects into digital materialities of media compilations.

Taking cloth from dresses made by her mother, Jayne Wallace created a collage that then translates into a digital film.

The physical qualities that result from making the fabric collages (variation in layerings, thicknesses, stitching, fraying) each map onto directions for how the corresponding digital media will be composed in a compilation, and serves as a collaborative method of curating media in new ways.