Material artifacts play highly significant roles in mediating people's rituals of honoring the lives of deceased loved ones and dealing with the grief that results from loss. They can powerfully evoke memories of the deceased and prompt reflections on mortality. Digital technologies are now a pervasive part of everyday life, and new issues are emerging as they intersect with people's everyday experiences of bereavement and their rituals of adapting to loss. We have undertaken two design investigations that focus on new ideas for creating technologies that could better support rituals of honoring deceased loved ones. Through our design-led research, we created working prototypes in two different contexts: Timecard was conceptualized and designed in the United Kingdom, and Fenestra was conceptualized and designed in Japan. Each of these projects represents efforts to design novel technologies for supporting domestic rituals of honoring in ways that are sensitive to the individual, social, and cultural contexts in which they were created. The core goal of this paper is to describe and reflect on these design efforts and in doing so to provide insights into creating technologies that enable the living to place and honor the dead in the context of their everyday lives.
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