ThanatoFenestra

Reflexive VR Storytelling Design Beyond Immersion: Facilitating Self-Reflection on Death and Loneliness

“…Our study of Anonymous suggests that four reflexive qualities enabled the audience to reflect on their individual experiences, fears and concerns about death and loneliness. Prior work in HCI has addressed these notions through the design of artefacts that help people to deal with end of life matters such as bereavement [30,39] and memorialization of the dead [57,58]. Our work is the first to look at the contribution CVR can make to the design of technology to stimulate reflection on death and loneliness.…”

“…HCI researchers have recognised the need to address themes of death and mortality [31]. Previous work in the area of thanatosensitive design has explored how bespoke physical artefacts [58], photography [19], and the participatory design of personally meaningful objects [39] can provoke reflections on death, grief and bereavement [30,32,57]. This literature has shown that technology can prompt reflection for specific groups of people, including the elderly or bereaved family members, but it did not focus on reflections about death and loneliness through the use of storytelling and VR.…”

How Culture Shapes What People Want From AI

“…For instance, culturally adaptive design concepts [55,92] were proposed to better respond to culture-specific human behaviors and accommodate cultural preferences. Some studies examined values of specific national contexts and how they are or could be embedded in the fabric of the local design practices [49,81,102,119] or use cases [37,71,113,122]. Studies of the use of globally collaborative system [8,18,101], and cross-nation difference in tech-mediated attitude and behavior [9,17,42,60,62,68,72,116,123,126] Deepening situated understanding of HCI Studies that situate interaction in specific sociocultural contexts [3,16,77,110]; Propositions to elevate nuanced cultural understandings [6,22,77] Expanding design practice to consider culture-specific human behaviors and accommodate cultural preferences…”

Information science and the inevitable: A literature review at the intersection of death and information management: An Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) paper

“…In addition to developing design concepts and studying users, many works acknowledge and explore the complexity of the intersection of death and technology, such as the relevance and influence of different ages and cultural backgrounds (Bos, 1995; Foong, 2008; Odom et al, 2018; Uriu et al, 2006; Uriu & Okude, 2010; van den Hoven et al, 2008), the entanglement of interactive technology and spiritual death practices (Uriu et al, 2018, 2019), and the curatorial aspect of such artifacts (Wallace et al, 2020). Works have also touched upon broad legal, ethical, technical, and professional issues that affect information systems (Boscarioli et al, 2017; Maciel & Pereira, 2015), such as the social influence of technologically mediated relationships with the dead (van Ryn et al, 2017) or the adoption of death‐related technologies for digital archeology (Graham et al, 2013).…”

“…As examples of thanatosensitive design in practice, several works develop digital artifacts to support the honoring and mourning processes. Some digital artifacts serve communication between mourners (van den Hoven et al, 2008) while others provide pictorial representation to digital memorials (Bos, 1995; Chaudhari et al, 2016; Odom et al, 2018; Uriu & Odom, 2016; Uriu & Okude, 2010; Wallace et al, 2020) or a combined representation of physical and digital remains of someone deceased (Uriu et al, 2018). The artifacts differ in their various focuses (e.g.…”