We’re documenting and sharing detail of the completed research project : Enabling Ongoingness: Content Creation & Consumption in the New Digital Age funded by the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) UK.

The project was a design engagement with older people, people living with dementia, people approaching the end of their lives and people who are bereaved.

One aim of the project was to find new ways to capture and represent something meaningful about an individual and their relationships through a combination of physical things and digital media (which could mean photographs, music, film clips etc). We hope to better understand the potential benefits that design and digital technologies can bring to people to offer new ways to: (i) Express a sense of who they are in the present, but also for the future; (ii) Make objects and media content that will support other people after one’s death; (iii) Enable people, who are already bereaved, to maintain lasting bonds in new ways with someone who has now died.

The project was called Enabling Ongoingness because the term ongoingness suggests that our relationships with each other, especially the most personally meaningful of these, do not end if someone dies. For many people there is continuity and something that lasts that can be of great comfort and inner support for people when they are bereaved. Rather than thinking of endings, we championied continued bonds between people, hoped to support these for participants and to enable people to think of things that we could all make together not only for now, but also for the future.

The materiality of services: manipulations and possible hacks to support ongoingness