Designing Anekdota: Investigating Personal Metadata for Legacy

This project uses research through design to explore how metadata could be used as a design material to create inheritable artefacts that make personal legacy experiential. Metadata is produced as traces of life, and by designing artifacts that capture and represent these traces, interaction design offers the possibility to experience the everyday practices of someone else as they are passed on and inherited. We use interviews with people interested in data practices, memorializing, and who have experienced grief to find themes and insights for designing with metadata as well as for legacy. Based on these, we developed the prototype Anekdota, a handheld metadata detector that lets an inheritor experience bequeathed location metadata. From a series of think-aloud walks, Anekdota was tested with participants to reveal sensitizing concepts for designing for metadata, and imaginative leaps for how this metadata may become a part of future legacy practices.