Digital Death

Love After Death @Redbridge Library

Love after Death is a research project that uses speculative design to explore the relationship between technology, creativity and death. It uses co-creation and public engagement as part of an iterative design cycle that aims to produce new knowledge about people’s relationship to their physical and digital legacies. Design and emerging technologies impact how environments, rituals and language are shaping end-of-life practices.

Love After Death was piloted at Redbridge Library during Dying Matters week and opened up key questions for the local community about legacy including: “how technology may be able to preserve people’s stories so future generations will be able to access things” and discovering “new ideas, creative… something to share with the family and community.” Redbridge Library as a core partner in this project is interested in deepening this enquiry, by questioning how commissioning art and social events in libraries can create a deeper public engagement into questions around death and dying within their diverse local communities. Their interest in Love After Death is its potential to capture people’s imagination and make design futures seem real, giving the public creative spaces for contemplating mortality.

Overall this experience insights people to think deeply about their lives, bodies and loved ones, which expands pubic perceptions of the relationship between technology, creativity and death. It introduces people to planning end of life wishes using interdisciplinary research methods. At its core, the project is asking all participants to think through key questions about being human at the end of life.