SERINA LIU 🙇🏻‍♀️

You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone: Explore Digital Legacy, is a project that aims to bridge the knowledge gap that exists currently for digital legacy, create a continual connection between the living and the dead, show how we can have some sense of agency over our own deaths and more importantly, facilitate the move of digital legacy from an area of practicality to an area of sentimentality through visual branding, scenario/world building, and experiential narrative. 

With the ever changing landscape of our society, it’s not out of the question that traditional practices and routines are becoming outdated and are in need of a revision. Death is no exception. As our digital lives grow, our digital legacy has become an important asset to funeral planning as well as a way to facilitate how our stories and legacy can be carried on. However, currently, there is a lack of actual guidance that addresses how we can have a meaningful digital legacy or what importance a digital legacy can carry beyond just a memorial page on Facebook or giving your family your twitter password. 

My personal motivation for this topic stems from the fact that I’m reaching a stage in my life where I have friends that are passing away, but who also have had these really rich digital personas and presences. I started catching myself thinking about my old high school friend, Misha, who had passed away my freshman year of college. Unlike the situations many families of young adults find themselves in, his family has his password and was able to change his page into a memorial page. Yet the posts made don't ever feel like him and this reoccurring trend in a lot of the Facebook pages of my friends that have passed stirs up this question in my mind: Is this really what they would’ve wanted? I started thinking about how intimate last words and death use to be, but nowadays with the use of social media, people’s last words are incredibly public and left on their Instagram, Facebook, etc. “forever”.

What was done over the 12 week period was my attempt to understand how digital legacy could have a more conscious space carved out for it in the future. The reasoning for it being an analog booklet is based around this idea of emphasizing reflection and doing things with intent. In contrast to the quick and absentmindedness of writing something digitally, writing something down by hand involves more intention and this idea of not adding more to your digital legacy. There’s also a reiterative process to it where if you fill up your entire book and need to document more things, you can request for a second copy. The hope is that people are able to put out a more accurate and truthful image of themselves to provide a more holistic and human legacy.

Also, a special thanks to Ilsur Aptukov for the logo design!!