Design for Rituals of Letting Go

Abstract

People increasingly live their lives online, accruing large collections of digital possessions, which symbolically represent important relationships, events, and activities. Most HCI research on bereavement focuses on retaining these significant digital possessions to honor the departed. However recent work suggests that significant digital possessions may complicate moving on; they function as both comforting and painful reminders but currently provide inflexible methods for disposal. Little work has investigated the disposal of digital objects as a means of letting go. To better understand this we interviewed 10 psychotherapists who employ rituals of letting go to help patients overcome loss in situations such as a divorce, a breakup, or a stillbirth. Patients disposed of either natural artefacts or symbolic personal possessions through actions such as burning, burying, or placing in a body of water. Therapists noted people increasingly have digital possessions, and that the act of deletion does not offer the same cathartic sense of release as disposal of material artefacts. Based on analysis of this grief therapy, we propose a new conceptual framework for rituals of letting go that highlights temporality, visibility, and force. It provides a vocabulary to talk about disposal. We then offer design implications connecting the rituals of letting go to the disposal of digital things. Based on our interviews and analytic framework, we propose novel technologies that better connect the embodied nature of letting go rituals to the process of digital disposal.

Ambiguity as a Resource to Inform Proto-Practices

“…Recently, Kutti and Bannon [41] have identified a turn to practice research in HCI, noting that the increasing interest in complex real world problems, on context of interaction, appropriation, materiality, and embodiment (particularly when attempting to overcome the divide between mind and body) shows that HCI is slowly moving beyond a sole focus on interaction [22,24,32,69]. The interaction paradigm, as the authors call it, is individually focused on user needs, technology centric and ahistorical.…”

Taste Your Emotions

“…Despite the growing body of work on affective technologies [8,18,33,37,41,46], to date, applications of taste-emotion mappings have been limited within HCI. Landmark examples come from gaming applications, in which taste supports an immersive experience in combination with other stimuli.…”

Futures of digital death: Past, present and charting emerging research agenda

“…This landscape is now changing with people's renewed interest in personalized practices around death and dying in both the physical and digital space from ritualized practices to more mundane ones. Ways in which we deal with digital selves, the body and its remains, the memorialization of lost ones, and the spatio-temporal and social context surrounding such practices have shifted the way in which we engage with death, from prescribed and formal practices to more dynamic, flexible and personally meaningful ones Sas, Whittaker, & Zimmerman, 2016).…”

“…In contrast, other body of work has starting to uncover the value of digital disposal for putting to rest aspects of the relationship with the departed (Odom, Banks, et al, 2012; or for processing stronger grief emotions (Massimi & Baecker, 2010;Sas & Whittaker, 2013;Sas, Whittaker, et al, 2016). By emphasizing letting go and cutting ties, such work advances a significant shift in grief technologies, with a focus on rituals and a critique of disposal through mere deletion.…”

“…Noticeable work here include the exploration of disposal practices following digital breakup (Sas & Whittaker, 2013), and the value of rituals in this context, i.e. rituals of honoring, letting go, and self-transformation involving specific symbolic objects and actions (Sas, Whittaker, et al, 2016;. Such work emphasizes the distinct qualities of digital and physical possessions that need to be accounted for in their disposal.…”