Bridget Everett
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DEATH & TECHNOLOGY
Facebook will have more dead users than living by 2065.
“Death is likely the single best invention of life.”
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— Steve Jobs, 2005 commencement speech, Stanford University
Reflecting on his own mortality after coming close to death proclaiming [1]
Shifting death planning from a culturally silenced topic to an interactive, meaningful dialogue, making it more accessible for individuals and their loved ones.
SHIFTING DEATH PLANNING
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The main challenge we uncovered is sparking conversations about death between individuals and their loved ones. Others include curating digital memories and navigating how our data ties us to others. Our goal is to embrace death, strengthen connection, respect personal preferences, and highlight the lasting impact of these choices.
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RESEARCH PROCESS & METHODS
Mapping Death: A Multi-Method Investigation
We dug deep—intentionally blending expert interviews, diary studies, fieldwork, and platform analysis to examine death from every angle. By pairing traditional qualitative methods with unexpected tools like game prototyping and scenario exercises, we captured not just how individuals, cultures, and systems approach death, but how design can reframe it. This layered, cross-disciplinary process unearthed insights often left buried.
Participant Research Methods
SEMI-STRUCTURED INTERVIEWS
Presented hypothetical end-of-life scenarios to prompt open ideation and strategic thinking around death.
SCENARIO BASED RESEARCH
Presented hypothetical end-of-life scenarios to prompt open ideation and strategic thinking around death.
DIARY STUDIES
Allowed participants to reflect over time on their thoughts about death, legacy, and digital identity.
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EXPERT INTERVIEWS
Expert Interviews: Industry & Domain Perspectives
Talking about death is hard—Wo we asked the people who do it for a living. Their guidance shaped how we approached sensitive conversations, ensuring users felt prepared, not blindsided, when facing end-of-life decisions.​
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Expert insight kept us grounded in empathy while exposing the real gaps in how digital death is handled. It helped us balance emotional weight with practical clarity, letting users navigate digital legacy without added harm.
01 / GREG LUNGREN
SEATTLE, WA
Memorial Designer/Artist

Order of the Good Death Founder
 Seattle, WA
Lundgren Monuments designs custom glass and granite memorials, urns, and caskets, rethinking memorialization. He’s illustrated children’s books on death and co-founded The Order of the Good Death.
02 / JED BRUBAKER
BOULDER, CO
Design Researcher, Professor at College of Media, Communication and Information, University of Colorado Boulder
His research covers digital identity, social media, and human-centered computing, drawing from CSCW, HCI, psychology, STS, and critical theory.
03 / WILL ODOM
BURNABY, CANADA
Design Researcher, Professor School of Interactive Arts + Technology at the Simon Fraser University
Will Odom is an HCI researcher focused on tech that supports personal growth, meaning-making, and sustainable futures. He founded the Homeware Lab, funded by the Canada Foundation.
"We talk about data privacy like it's urgent. But after death? It's a forgotten frontier."
WILL ODEM , DESIGN RESEARCHER
​How we want to die is the most important—and most avoided—conversation in America. Death Over Dinner flips that silence into dialogue, connection, and agency.
JED BRUBAKER, DESIGN RESEARCH
04 / ELIZABETH GRAVOUGEL
SEATTLE, WA
People’s Memorial Association 
 (PMA) Board Member/
 Interaction Designer
 Seattle, WA
Elizabeth Grauvogel studied mortuary science, worked in death care, and now advocates for transparency and consumer choice on the PMA Board.
05 / NORA MENKIN
SEATTLE, WA
People’s Memorial Association (PMA) Executive Director
 Seattle, WA
Nora directs People’s Memorial Association and The Co-op Funeral Home. She specializes in home funerals, Jewish traditions, natural burials, and co-founded The Order of the Good Death.
06 / MITZI WEILAND
SEATTLE, WA
Grief Counselor/ Death Cafe Facilitator at The Wallingford Community Center
 Seattle, WA
Mitzi practices family therapy and grief counseling in Eastlake. She’s on the Wallingford Senior Center board, leads Death Cafes, and is certified in thanatology, focusing on grief, loss, and aging.
Death Cafes offer
a space to talk about death. These candid gatherings break silence & normalize conversations
on mortality.
MITZI WEILAND, DEATH CAFE FACILITATOR
SEMI-STRUCTURED PARTICIPANT INTERVIEWS
Participant Interviews: Perspectives on Death & Legacy
To understand how real individuals perceive, engage with, and plan for death, specifically focusing on their digital footprint and end-of-life expectations. These interviews emphasized personal experiences and reflective conversations.
Participant Profile Highlights
LOCATION
Explored personal perceptions, experiences shaping views on death, expectations for legacy, and digital presence.
DIGITAL PRESENCE
Each had an active digital footprint, engaging regularly with online platforms.
COMFORT & OPENESS
Selected for being comfortable discussing death, emotionally stable, and not in active grief
DEMOGRAPHICS
Age range varied (18–55), with no age restrictions, offering diverse life-stage perspectives.
HYPOTHETICAL DEATH SCENARIOS
Participants were open to engaging in hypothetical and playful death-related exercises.
DIARY INSIGHTS
Open Death Diaglogues
Through participant journaling exercises, we gathered personal, unfiltered reflections on death, legacy, and digital inheritance. These insights reveal how individuals navigate password-protected artifacts, shift away from traditional beliefs, and show an eagerness to engage openly in conversations about mortality.
PARTICIPANT
No one ever asks me about death—it feels good to actually talk about it.
PARTICIPANT
My most meaningful files and photos are password-protected. I’ve never thought about who could access them after I’m gone.
PARTICIPANT
I want my film photography to outlive me—something lasting that someone else could enjoy like I did. I haven’t planned anything yet. My healthcare app keeps prompting me for an advance directive, but at 25, it feels too soon.
EXPERT
I call it the post mortem paradox. People don’t care about their own accounts after their gone. The person who is in a position to take action and cares the least. The people who care can’t take any action.”
PARTICIPANT
I want to preserve my photos, my blog, and my Instagram—not just as memories, but as creative extensions of myself, the personal and artistic identity I’ve built online.
PARTICIPANT
I want to preserve my photos, my blog, and my Instagram—not just as memories, but as creative extensions of myself, the personal and artistic identity I’ve built online.
EXPERT
Keeping the facebook profile up might make it difficult for active grievers due to them getting notifications that they can't control.”
PARTICIPANT
I have a digital backup, but it’s not shared with anyone in case of death.”
PARTICIPANT
I want my film photography to outlive me—something lasting that someone else could enjoy like I did. I haven’t planned anything yet. My healthcare app keeps prompting me for an advance directive, but at 25, it feels too soon.
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RESEARCH RESULTS
Dead Giveaways & Grave Insights
Our insights reveal that death remains a cultural taboo, leaving individuals unprepared and their loved ones burdened. By exploring how people perceive, plan, and memorialize death—especially in the digital age—we identified the need for tools that encourage open, reflective conversations and intentional end-of-life planning.
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Insight 01 /
End-of-life conversations are avoided, but essential.
Insight 02 /
Minimizing financial burden drives planning.
People want their end-of-life wishes to be honored by close connections, yet rarely initiate these conversations due to social taboos and discomfort around death.
Evaluation and life review that can be intimidating for many of us. Constant awareness of death leaves most of us feeling anxious and uncomfortable. While these perceptions are all fair and reasonable, avoiding discussion about death does not make these issues go away. It simply delays and often exacerbates them. Between the subject matter experts we spoke with and individuals who willingly came forward to talk about death, they conveyed how we should face this topic in order to lead a meaningful and authentic life, but it was rare they spoke about their thoughts and feelings with their close connections. If close connections are uncertain about what an individual's true wishes are after they're gone, it can add to family turmoil at an already sad and stressful time. Planning for death doesn’t translate to anticipating death; it shows that individuals care about those they are leaving behind and the legacy that transcends them into being honored after death.
A key motivator in end-of-life planning is easing the financial and emotional stress on family. Individuals often address this by arranging finances, planning dispositions, and discussing wishes with loved ones.
Conversations about individual’s expectations around death planning or body disposition and setting up finances have all shown to help close connections. Close connections were able to focus on cherishing the memories and grieving rather than being stressed out about what the individual wanted and what their future beholds. Conversations around death are limited by the general discomfort around the topic and lack of knowledge about end-of-life planning. Recently, Katrina Spade shifted death conversations to planning for disposition and giving back to the earth, and individuals said it prompted them to have a conversation with their close connections due to their inclination towards greener options. If an individual's wishes are not known when they die, the family will be faced with making difficult decisions during the time of grief. Marriage and having children are an example of milestones that prompt individuals to plan for end-of-life. Individuals are more motivated to take actions in order to relieve the burden for their close connections.
Insight 03 /
Digital identity is shaped by our network.
Most individuals don’t realize their digital identity is a living reflection of their interactions with close connections—it’s not static, but constantly shaped by relationships.representation of the interaction between themselves and their close connections.
Social media has become deeply woven into daily life. Over the past two decades, people have shared memories—photos, videos, conversations—turning their profiles into living archives of experiences. But these memories aren’t isolated; they reflect relationships and the connections that shape them. Through secondary research and participant interviews, it became clear that these digital interactions don’t end with death. Friends and family continue to visit profiles, leave comments, and revisit shared photos—turning them into informal digital memorials. Yet, few individuals recognize this intimate link between their digital identity and their social connections. As a result, this often goes unconsidered in end-of-life planning, despite its lasting emotional impact.
Insight 04 /
Your data, their burden.
People may decide to delete, preserve, or maintain their digital presence after death, but often don’t consider how these choices emotionally affect those left behind.
We live in an era where our data lives on for much longer than a human lifespan. Individuals expressed how their digital data should be treated through three possible avenues - have no presence at all, leave the presence as is, or keep adding to it after death. Though they had these expectations they were clearly unaware of how close connections could be emotionally affected after their death. One example of this is not giving lack of access data and unawareness about the treatment of social accounts leading to data loss or confusion. This leads us to believe conversations with close connections are important to have for understanding how people’s digital presence plays a role in not only their lives but others. Although it is a personal decision to delete or share a digital legacy, this can cause stress to close connections who don’t understand the decision. The varying policies of different social platforms when it came to death didn’t help better the situation. A lot of times close connections had to go through additional stress and logistical nightmares to access critical data of the individuals who died. and address these concerns. With technology becoming more ingrained in people's lives, it has become easier to manage expectations of close connections over end-of-life conversations. This will allow people to explain the reasons behind what they want for their digital presence to close connections.
Insight 05 /
Access denied after death.
People accumulate a massive amount of digital assets—photos, documents, accounts—but most of it is locked behind passwords. After death, close connections are often left without access, making it difficult or impossible to retrieve important work, memories, or information.
Social media has become deeply woven into daily life. Over the past two decades, people have shared memories—photos, videos, conversations—turning their profiles into living archives of experiences. But these memories aren’t isolated; they reflect relationships and the connections that shape them. Through secondary research and participant interviews, it became clear that these digital interactions don’t end with death. Friends and family continue to visit profiles, leave comments, and revisit shared photos—turning them into informal digital memorials. Yet, few individuals recognize this intimate link between their digital identity and their social connections. As a result, this often goes unconsidered in end-of-life planning, despite its lasting emotional impact.
Insight 06 /
Unclaimed keepsakes without a future.
While individuals hope their valuable possessions will be enjoyed by others after they’re gone, they often don’t take action to find a recipient—largely due to a lack of urgency around end-of-life planning.
Mass adoption of technology has changed how people create, consume, and hold onto memories. As physical objects fade—replaced by digital music, books, photos, and videos—people now generate data faster and in greater volume than ever before. Younger generations, in particular, are building their legacies almost entirely online. Our research revealed that while the desire to leave something behind remains strong, the form it takes has shifted. Digital photos stand out as the primary medium tied to memories. Participants consistently expressed a wish to preserve these images after death—but felt overwhelmed by the sheer volume of content and unsure how to curate what truly matters. Current data management tools fail to support this need. The digital inventory of a person’s life has only recently become part of end-of-life planning, leaving a gap in helping individuals shape their digital legacy with intention.
01 / Lack of Quality Food Choices
“You see what they serve?! Subway, I’m tired of. Chester’s Chicken. Same thing every place.”
“We like the bigger chains (Retros, TA, Flying J) have Denny’s and Subway, but it’s all the same. It used to be ‘Mom and Pop’ places.”
Rest in Policies
A Guide to Digital Limbo
The lack of standardization across social media platforms creates added frustration for grieving families. Each platform has its own process, requiring different documents, forms, and terminology, leaving loved ones to navigate a confusing, inconsistent system. Some ask for death certificates, others require legal proof, and many offer little guidance or human support.
This patchwork approach forces families to repeatedly relive their loss while struggling to manage accounts—whether to deactivate, memorialize, or protect personal information. The core issue is clear: there’s no universal process, leaving families emotionally drained and without a straightforward way to close or control their loved one’s digital legacy.
ACCOUNT CLOSURE
LinkedIn provides a process for closing the account of a deceased member. A verified immediate family member can request the closure by submitting a support request with relevant documentation, such as a death certificate.
MEMORIALIZATION & ACCOUNT CLOSURE
Facebook allows accounts to be memorialized upon notification of the user's death. Memorialized accounts serve as a space for friends and family to share memories. Users can designate a "legacy contact" to manage certain aspects of their memorialized account.
MEMORIALIZATION & ACCOUNT CLOSURE
Similar to Facebook, Instagram permits accounts to be memorialized upon request. Memorialized accounts remain visible but cannot be logged into or modified.​
Verified immediate family members can request the removal of an account by submitting a request to Instagram with appropriate documentation.
INACTIVE ACCOUNT MANAGER (PRE-PLAN) & ACCOUNT CLOSURE
Users can set this up before death. They choose what happens after 3 to 18 months of inactivity.
They can assign trusted contacts to receive data or have the account deleted. Request by Family After Death, Family can request account closure. Google requires a death certificate, government ID, and legal proof of authority
ACCOUNT DEACTIVATION
Twitter allows for the deactivation of a deceased user's account upon request from an authorized individual. The account will then be removed from public view, and usernames will be freed up for us
ACCOUNT DEACTIVATION
Pinterest provides a process for account deactivation or removal after receiving a request from an immediate family member. Documentation, such as a death certificate, is usually required to complete the process.
APPROACH
Design for death should be clear, human, and stigma-free—removing bureaucracy, normalizing conversation, and putting people before policies.
These principles were shaped by recurring patterns identified in research on death, digital systems, and user behavior. Interviews, competitive analyses, and cultural studies revealed four consistent themes.
01 /
NORMALIZE DEATH
Death is often stigmatized in American culture, associated primarily with fear and negativity. Design should work to reduce this stigma, fostering openness and encouraging a balanced, constructive mindset around death.
02 /
FACILITATE HUMAN CONNECTION
Conversations with close connections are a crucial step in end-of-life planning. Design should empower users to initiate and navigate these discussions on their own terms, strengthening relationships through dialogue.
03 /
RESPECT CULTURE & CHOICE
Beliefs and attitudes toward death differ widely across cultural, spiritual, and personal contexts. Design should accommodate diverse preferences, offering flexible support tailored to each individual's values and choices.
04 /
DON'T GHOST YOUR LOVED ONES
End-of-life decisions often carry significant consequences for loved ones. Design should provide clear, accessible information to help users understand these impacts and make informed, thoughtful choices.
Under Construction
The case study is a work-in-progress. Please check back in April to see the finished project.