Crafting Remembrance Beyond the Self: Older Adults' Digital and Material Legacies

Artifacts encode memories and shape how one is remembered after death. Older adults, given their life stage, are often engaged in intentional end-of-life planning, making their perspectives on curation for remembrance post-mortem valuable. While HCI has examined older adults’ curation of memory artifacts (e.g., to support well-being), little is known about their curation preferences with the intent of shaping how one is remembered after death. Drawing on interviews with older adults, our work provides insights into how individuals think about remembrance after death, including who is remembered (subject) and who remembers (audience), and how physical, temporal, or relational traces captured in artifacts mediate remembrance. These findings offer design implications for legacy crafting systems to support remembrance that transcends the self, account for the intentional legacy crafting work for distinct audiences, and support hybrid artifacts that allow memories to move across physical and digital spaces.