What Happens After Death? Using a Design Workbook to Understand User Expectations for Preparing their Data
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Digital data has become a key part of everyday life: people manage increasingly large and disparate collections of photos, documents, media, etc. But what happens after death? How can users select and prepare what data to leave behind before their eventual death? To explore how to support users, we first ran an ideation workshop to generate design ideas; then, we created a design workbook with 12 speculative concepts that explore diverging approaches and perspectives. We elicited reactions to the concepts from 20 participants (18-81, varied occupations). We found that participants anticipated different types of motivation at different life stages, wished for tools to feel personal and intimate, and preferred individual control on their post-death self-representation. They also found comprehensive data replicas creepy and saw smart assistants as potential aides for suggesting meaningful data. Based on the results, we discuss key directions for designing more personalized and respectful death-preparation tools.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.029 | 0.040 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".