Remembering the Deceased

What if we could help grieving families find comfort in preserving and sharing treasured memories, keeping their loved ones close beyond traditions?

Team members and divisions

Problem statement

How Might We help grieving families cope with loss by preserving and sharing treasured memories?

Grieving families struggle to cope with loss as stories, voices, and emotions fade over time, making it harder to keep their loved ones' presence alive.

Problem formulation process

Original problem statement:

How might we enable grieving families to have more treasured moments/information to remember their deceased loved ones by, so that they can preserve the deceased's legacy.

We started our project by trying to understand the current grief process for various user groups, i.e. grieving families, religious groups, and relevant agencies (MyLegacy, NEA). We also wanted to know if Singapore residents wanted a more enriched avenue/platform for their loved ones and future generations to remember them.

Key learnings from user interviews

After surveying 432 Singapore residents and conducting 6 in-depth interviews, we found out that everyone has different ways of grieving but the current process relies on the traditional niches, memories, and keeping knick knacks from their loved ones. However, memories fade over time and storing physical knick knacks can create clutter. Moreover, visiting the niche can be tough due to inaccessibility like mobility issues.

We also found that there is a desire to have a more personal way of remembering their loved ones, although there were some concerns around privacy, motivations, and content moderation. With a better understanding of public sentiment, we decided to modify our problem statement to focus on the core intention of staying connected to the deceased’s life and creating stronger bonds across generations.

While speaking to NEA, we also learnt that they are facing:

• Large crowds and accessibility: During special occasions like Qing Ming and anniversaries, there's peak visitation and overcrowding. NEA makes special parking and transport arrangements to help with crowd control.
• Land scarcity and alternatives: Due to Singapore's land constraints, traditional columbarium niches are less viable long-term and more people are opting to scatter ashes as it requires less land and is more cost-effective.

Proposed solution

AfterLifeSG is a online tribute solution that allows grieving families (including friends and extended family) to capture the biography, key milestones, and memories from the deceased’s lives, as well as create strong bonds across generations as a storytelling tool, fostering deeper connections between future generations and the deceased.

With AfterLifeSG, families can leverage the shared memories to capture a more complete life story of the deceased that will not fade over time and can be used to create bonds when telling stories to future generations.

Some potential measures of success include:

• Quality and depth of memories being preserved
• Sense of connection felt by family members to deceased relatives they never met
• Stories and feedback about how memories are being shared and kept alive
• Frequency of family interactions with preserved memories
• Number of generations actively participating
• Number of new memories or stories discovered through family sharing

Impact of AfterLifeSG

As a team, we position AfterLifeSG as a secure, personalisable, and accessible digital alternative to physical columbaria, backed by a trusted government agency to provide long-term assurance for a sustainable approach to preserving legacies for future generations.

AfterLifeSG provides:

• Richer, more personal tributes – Beyond basic nameplates, AfterLifeSG allows multimedia (eulogies, photos, videos) for a deeply personal tribute.
• Greater accessibility and convenience – Eliminates travel challenges; accessible anytime, anywhere.
• Sustainable, everlasting and future-proof – Helps reduce reliance on physical columbaria, preserving land for future generations.
• Family tree integration – Connects deceased relatives into a generational legacy view, offering a feature that physical niches and private platforms lack.

Future steps for your project

We envision the future for AfterLifeSG to include:

• Search and discover – organically find other existing tributes on AfterLifeSG
• Enhanced look at their lives through their socials – see how the deceased lived and documented their lives through their social media channels
• Multi-religion/culture support: Integrate other ways of paying respects for other religions i.e. lighting a candle, throwing soil, or dedicating a quote from the Bible or Quran.
• Enhanced memorial features: Ability to upload audio recordings e.g. from loved ones, or the deceased’s favourite phrase, and links to deceased’s previous social media accounts (get a glimpse of how they lived).
• Moderation/privatisation: Flexibility for next-of-kin to selectively moderate and privatise certain memories.
• Possible AI integrations: Create life-like avatar or chatbot that loved ones can interact with whenever they miss them or on special occasions i.e. anniversaries, birthdays.
• Integrations with government agencies like MyLegacy: Links to NRIC, estate planning, wills, and digital assets, making post-death arrangements easier.