Commemoration Platform Lets You Determine How You're Remembered Online

On Halloween night in 2022, more than 100,000 people flooded the streets of Seoul, South Korea, to celebrate and participate in the city’s festivities. Thousands funneled into a 14-foot-wide alley in the Itaewon district from multiple directions.

The crowd grew so large that no one could move in the alley, resulting in the deadliest crowd crush in the nation’s history. Nearly 160 people were killed, and another 196 were injured.

Soonho Kwon, a first-year human-centered computing Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech, lived within walking distance of the alley when the incident occurred.

“It was tragic,” Kwon said. “It really makes you think about how life is fragile. Everyone in my community talked about what it would have been like if they were in that alleyway.”

Many of the victims were young people — some of them teens who had no identification on them. Kwon thought about their family members being told their loved ones’ lives had been cut short. He wondered what memories those families would have of the deceased.

The incident inspired Kwon to create a new mobile platform that helps young adults and career professionals create a post-death memorial for their families. The platform, which Kwon and his research collaborators named Timeless, allows users to be remembered how they want to be remembered in the event of their untimely death.

“Most death preparation services are for terminally ill patients or aging adults, focusing on will management or funeral planning,” Kwon said. “We thought such needs may differ for young adults and asked how we could design a system that better caters to their needs.”

Timeless is a photo-based death preparation system that enables users to send a physical package containing pre-curated pictures, voice recordings, and letters to a designated recipient in the event of their passing. 

The system syncs with a user’s mobile photo album and creates a list of scanned faces. Users can select a face and view all the photos they’ve taken with that person. They can choose which photos they want sent to that person after death and write individual messages for each image.

Once the user’s death has been reported, Timeless sends a package to each selected individual with printed photos, letters, and a QR code or a CD that contains videos or voice recordings.

Breaking the Ice

Kwon and his collaborators designed Timeless based on a group study that asked participants to imagine what would happen if they unexpectedly died. The participants were asked what was on their bucket lists, their epitaphs, and what they would wish for if they could make one wish come true.

“Surprisingly, people were happy to participate because we framed it in a way that wasn’t gloomy,” Kwon said. “Many shared that reflecting on their death motivated them to actively express their love and be grateful for what they have. Turning something as heavy as death into something positive was a key design implication.”

Digital vs. Physical

Kwon began his research career examining virtual commemoration systems, including Facebook and Instagram commemoration pages, during the Covid-19 pandemic and exploring how technology can meaningfully memorialize the deceased.

He said two aspects distinguish Timeless from other commemoration platforms: 

• The deceased can decide how and by whom they want to be remembered.
• The fusion of digital memorialization with physical memorialization

“Leveraging only the digital side of it can be superficial,” Kwon said. “We build monuments, statues, and tombstones because the notion of death itself is losing your physical presence. By making it physical, we aimed to connect the discussion on digital legacies to traditional human commemoration forms.”

AI Afterlife

Kwon also said he is aware of artificial intelligence (AI) afterlife. This emerging technology allows people to train an AI agent and produce digital avatars with which family and friends can communicate after they die.

Meredith Ringel Morris, director and principal scientist for human-AI interaction at Google DeepMind, spoke about AI afterlife in October during the Summit on AI, Responsible Computing, and Society hosted by Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing.

In her talk, Morris spoke about the criticism AI afterlife is already facing for causing people to experience extended grief and the inability to move on from losing a loved one.

Kwon said another drawback is that AI agents are susceptible to hallucinations and could say untrue things about the deceased. 

“How can you say for sure that the representation of AI is me?” he said. “As researchers, our role is to explore and critically examine how the emergence of such technology may shape society while striving to ensure its development benefits people.” 

Kwon sees Timeless as a catalyst for meaningful discussions about how a digital legacy curation system may accurately reflect a user’s wishes before death. 

He will present a paper on Timeless's design process and its implications at the 2025 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) this week in Yokohama, Japan.