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Digital Legacy Design Project

Recently Leonie Fischer (leonifischer.com) contacted me about her design project, Necropolis. In her words:

Necropolis is a memorial object for ourdigital presence after we have passed away.

An algorithm transforms the Facebook activity of a person into light signals. These are transferred into small LED lights which then blink in an individual rhythm. The light is built from only technical components, while the surrounding structure features natural materials, which are commonly used in memorial objects or associated with death.

I, of course, was fascinated by the project, so I wanted to share more with you. Here are some images and an overview that Leonie was kind enough to send us:

Data is a physical good. Its production and storage is powered by huge amounts of electricity. If Cloud Computing was a country, it would even have the 5th biggest energy consumption worldwide. The high amounts of data that we produce daily through our devices are stored in Data Centers all over the world which are rented by big companies such as Amazon. But what happens to all the data once a loved one passes away? How to go through our digital inheritance? Do we need everything of that unfiltered mass of information thats left behind and how can we create value from it for ourselves? Can data affect our mourning process at all?

Necropolis is a memorial object for our digital presence after we have passed away. The aim of the project was to work with the digital mourning process itself and to make a design intervention that brings together the unfiltered mass of big data with a rising digital mourning culture in a culturally and ecologically sustainable way. An algorithm transforms the Facebook activity protocol of a person into light signals. These are transferred into small LED lights which then adapt the individual activity. The light is built from only technical components, while the surrounding structure features natural materials, which are commonly used in memorial objects or associated with death.

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All photos copyright by Leonie Fischer, 2017

Leonie Fischer is currently finishing the second year of her Product Design studies at Bauhaus University Weimar. The Project Necropolis was realized in 2017 and supervised by Tjeerd Veenhoven. It was seen from 17 – 21 September at “Baumwollspinnerei Rundgang” Leipzig as part of the group exhibition “Public Keys” and will be shown later this year at the Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven.

You can learn more at Leonie’s website: http://leonifischer.com/

 

 

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