For some time now photographic and digital technology have played an important role in documenting the significant moments in our lives - transitioning our precious seconds to the photo album and home video - to be treasured and passed on to the next generation. More recently social media has enabled new forms of mourning: blogs about grief, memorial pages on Facebook, video game tributes, shrines on twitter, digital scrapbooks and forums for the bereaved, generating ever increasing ways of remembering those we have loved and lost. Decades of similar digital content is also being abandoned by the departed: one aspect of an ever mounting legacy of digital and physical stuff accumulated then shed by us, posing new problems to the loved ones left to manage it.

With digital technology now so embedded in our personal rituals and social relations how can we deal with all the material of the departed in ways that respect their legacy, but doesn’t completely overface us?

What is the etiquette of engaging with an active community of memorialisation online? As the environmental cost of data storage mounts, should we even be allowed to have an online profile after we die?

Addressing these questions amongst others and positing some creative solutions, Dr Stacey Pitsillides is one of the new wave of thanatosensitive researchers and designers working with the phenomenon between death and technologies.