Mike Massimi: from Bereavement to Facebook

Mike Massimi

Mike Massimi, PhD, is a User Experience Researcher at Facebook, which recently revised its policy for the ‘deceased’ Facebooker. Although Massimi works in a different area at the social media platform, when he was at TAGlab Massimi became interested end of life and bereavement:

I started this project after working on a project at TAGlab where we were creating multimedia biographies for people with Alzheimer’s disease. At the end of one interview, a participant’s daughter stopped and said how much she valued the biography now, but that it would take on special importance when her father died. That got me thinking about death and technology in the first place, and put me down the road towards studying bereavement support.

“Thanatosensitive Design”

This interest led him to coin “thanatosensitive design” a term derived from Thanatos, the Greek word for death. For his thesis, Massimi developed a technology specific to death and decided to build an online bereavement support system.

“Thanatosensitive design looks at the conceptual and practical problems surrounding death in the creation of interactive systems. What my project tried to do was create a safe space for bereaved people — a place where members of a support group can talk openly about grief.”

Considering TAGlab’s focus is aging gracefully –  vs dying and after – I asked if Massimi worried that the topic may be ‘off topic’

“Yes, I did at times. However it emerged naturally from a project about aging gracefully, which makes it rooted in some of the core concepts that TAGlab was founded upon.”

Says his Prof, Ron Baecker:

“Mike chose a dissertation topic with imagination and courage, and has been vigorous in evangelizing its importance to the field of human-computer interaction,” adding. “This has led to a rapid growth of thanatosensitive design research worldwide, and to an increasing number of papers and workshops at leading conferences.”

Massimi values Baecker’s trust in his thesis topic:

“Ron’s biggest moment of support for me was when I pitched the idea of a thesis about thantosensitive design. I came in with a topic he hadn’t been thinking about, and he told me that ultimately it was my thesis and that he’d support whatever topic I’d choose. Even though the topic was at times only tangentially related to aging, it was tremendous that he put my own intellectual pursuits above the organizational goals, and that he trusted me enough to demonstrate the impact of my work.

Ultimately, Massimi hopes web designers consider what happens if the user were to die, or which other stakeholders need to be considered when designing interactive systems. From Massimi’s, paper Death Dying and Mortality: Towards  Thanatosensitive Design:

“Technology is intersecting with the end of life in new and unexpected ways. As we have outlined above, it has the capability to ease suffering, or to disturb our sensitivities through its strangeness and irreverence. All the while, people are appropriating a wide range of publicly-available technologies – from blogs to electronic photo frames – to react to the eventuality, actuality, and aftermath of death.”

It’s a topic that’s coming to the fore, and Massimi won a Best Paper Award at the 2014 Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCWS) Conference for “Craving, creating, and constructing comfort: Insights and opportunities for technology in hospice”

One of the challenges of this kind of work, says Massimi, “is that you try not to think like a computer person, even though you are.”

“The goal, is to discover people’s needs, develop the technology to address these needs and then actually get the technology into people’s hands. That’s what we like to do. We like to take it out of the lab and get it working.”