Michael Arnold

This paper explores the motivations, ritual practices, and cultural meanings of digital offerings on Chinese virtual memorials. Drawing on four years of online observation, auto-ethnography, and in-depth interviews, it finds digital offerings feature distinctive persistence, traceability, networked circulation and personalization. These affordances reshape mourning into an individualized, frequent, and flexible mediated practice, foregrounding mourner ’ s agency. Their circulation transforms private grief into a networked relational practice that challenges the utilitarian logic of traditional rituals. In this process, digital offerings and virtual memorials function as collective coping mechanisms, enabling bereaved parents to form affective communities grounded in shared trauma. Meanwhile, they are embedded in the digital economy of symbolic goods, producing intersections between emotional expression, affective labor, and commercial logics. Overall, as a mediated relational practice, digital offerings facilitate self-healing and filial piety while fostering connective mourning and social support networks, offering new possibilities for emotional communication and relationship building in China.

Digital technologies play an increasingly prominent role in memorialisation, but their use at cemeteries has been criticised for lack of sensitivity. Designers of digital cemetery technologies (cemtech) face a high risk of causing offence or failing to attract users due to social norms of memorial sites. To map this area of design and its pitfalls, we first developed a typology of cemtech through a review of examples from around the world. We then evaluated social acceptance of various types of cemtech through a survey of 1,053 Australian residents. Younger people were more accepting of cemtech than older people. Acceptance was highest for cemtech with three characteristics: familiarity, intimacy of user group and peacefulness. Through a reflexive thematic analysis, we identified four attitudinal dichotomies that explain divergent reactions to cemtech: Expands/Impedes, Public/Private, Lively/Restful and Pragmatic/Affective. We conclude with a discussion of how this work can assist designers of public memorialisation technologies.

Alkaline hydrolysis can lay claim to being a resource-efficient, effective, economical and environmentally sound method of final body disposition, relative to burial and cremation. On technical grounds it may have much to recommend it, however, like many other technical innovations, its take-up is hindered by the fact that it lacks a clear position in the public imagination. For this position to take shape, an understanding of just what it is and what it offers is required by proponents in the funeral industry who advise the bereaved, as well as by the material representations of the alkaline hydrolysis technologies themselves. In this article, we describe and analyse four extant alternative material and discursive forms of alkaline hydrolysis and how they variously occupy the fraught space where morality, death and marketing converge. Currently, each of the four forms of alkaline hydrolysis struggle to represent themselves in a public narrative that conveys their different ontologies and their competitive advantage, relative to burial and cremation, and this paper describes some key rhetorical and technical aspects of these struggles.

The research reported here draws upon four homes in Melbourne, Australia, where variable practices and strategies in the use of ICT's are adopted in negotiating the temporal and spatial dynamics of the working-home. Informed by theories from Science and Technology Studies we argue that these strategies arise in concernful relation with others – both human and non-human – that enable and constrain the possibilities for action.

Cybernetics has an exciting history that profoundly influenced HCI theory and practice. However, today, designers, engineers, and researchers are often unaware of how to engage with this powerful approach to inform technology design. We believe a cybernetic lens is vital to investigating and designing technologies for today's complex environments. In this in person, half-day workshop called "Cybernetic Lenses for Designing and Living in a Complex World", we present three cybernetic lenses demonstrated in two case studies: "From mundane objects to systems - asking better questions for technology design", and "Transportation networks, from human-computer interaction to socio-cultural consequences". Our goal is to offer an inclusive environment to provide theory and practical exercises for participants to gain and incorporate a cybernetics lens into their practice.

Human bodies are typically buried underground, horizontally ‘in repose’. To the extent that this orientation has become the standard; it is a non-choice that is under-interrogated by scholars. In this paper, we discuss innovations which allow for the vertical orientation of the body within the earth and for the vertical stacking of remains above the earth in high-rise structures. Both of these boundary-pushing forms of disposition address imminent shortages in the land allocated for cemeteries in the context of intense urbanisation and a peaking death rate. They also promise to transform the necrogeography of contemporary cities and intimate relations between the living and the dead. This paper is a collaboration between the DeathTech Research Team and the Managing Director of Upright Burials, where the dead are ‘stood to rest’ in shaft graves. The pragmatic advantages of vertical burial are easily explicated, but in this paper, we focus on the cultural and symbolic dimensions of this largely unfamiliar spatial relation and the challenges of ‘reorienting’ the public towards this new form of disposition.

This paper examines key discussion points among VR-interested Reddit users regarding a controversial case of VR groping reported in 2016. Through a mixed-methods approach that includes qualitative thematic analysis and quantitative coding, this paper identifies four key discussion themes: 1) Conceptualization—what is the act of groping? 2) Ethics—what is (un)acceptable about the act? 3) Action—what should be done about it? and 4) Vision— what does this act mean for the future of VR? Within these themes, most comments were dedicated to the questions of whether the act of groping in VR constitutes sexual assault or sexual harassment, whether it is the individual’s responsibility to respond to this act, and whether this act causes harm. These results assist in the formation of a framework for understanding and addressing concerns related to unwanted sexual behaviours in VR and other digital play spaces.

Presents an analysis of whether technologies can be considered innocent from their intended purpose. In a series of installments it has been argued that moral agents are not in principle limited to members of the human race, that non-humans and in particular technologies can be considered to act in the world, and that when they do so, they cannot be regarded as just tools or dumb instruments, that the actions of technologies are willful and occur in the foreknowledge of consequences, in a significant way, and that even technologies that are distributed in time and space may be defined with sufficient specificity to allocate moral accountability. Taken together, it has been argued that technologies are not innocent, and can be held to moral account.