Thesis Bucket

This week we were given the task to to think about a business model within our chosen thesis space. With not having a concrete solution in mind this was a fairly difficult thing to do. What this task did do though was making me aware of the whole system and made me think about all parts of that system:

1. Customer Segments
My goal is to create a service that outlives its owner in order to be inherited with a reflection of the owners identity. With this intention in mind I am looking at people that are alive and can build or put together a digital legacy. For now I think the customers are divided in two segments, the first one are people that have digital data and assets and want to decide what will happen with that, the second segment might be people who want to built a digital legacy by collecting.

2. Value Proposition
I think customization is a key with that service, it is about building a personal digital legacy in a meaningful way. A share might be newness and I want to look in tangible ways of saving this data.

3. Channels
Customers will be reached through web sales, which is a direct channel between the service and the customer. By looking at the channel phases (1. Awareness, 2. Evaluation, 3. Purchase, 4. Delivery, 5. After Sales) I realized that Awareness (How do I bring people to think about their death?) and After Sales (What is a good way to make people maintain their legacy?) might be the most difficult phases in my intended service.

4. Customer Relationship
Trust must be a very important goal that the service should reflect to the customer. Transparency might be a way to make the service trustful. I am imagine that the customer interacts with this service in a self-service manner with the help of automated assistance.

5. Revenue Stream
By looking at the market context I saw that most services offer both a monthly subscription and and a once in a lifetime fee.

6. Key Resources
The most important assets required is the online storage with a save security system in order provide privacy.

7. Key Activities
In order to make this model work I will have the web site as a key platform which needs to be continually developed and maintained. For that reason my key activities might be platform management, service provisioning, and platform promotion.

8. Key Partnership
I could imagine key partnerships with existing social networks.

9. Cost Structure
This business model is value-driven, it is important to focus on a personalized service.

I had some one-on-one interviews last week and was lucky enough to get insights from Paul Andrew Leonhard Licensed Funeral Director and Vice President at Gravenor – Home for Funerals and James Leedam from UK based Natural Burial Grounds.

In those interviews I heard a lot about Facebook and I thought it is interesting how the role of a Facebook pages changes after someone passed away. That page becomes a place for the friends to talk about their loved one and it is interesting how people can talk much more openly about that person: they post pictures, share memories and tell stories. The page becomes a digital meeting space just like the funeral where people come for one reason (the person who passed away) and can feel free to talk about their grief without having the sense of not being at the appropriate place or time. One of the reason might be that the Facebook page provides a group of people that all have one thing in common: they knew the person who passed away and each one has their own memories about that person. It might also help that this Facebook page is a digital representation of someone and it is in that sense not the “real world”, so even if somebody is gone, the digital representation remains and makes it easy to talk about that person or even to that person.

A second, for me important finding from the interviews was that only a few people prepare for death and that stands to reason. A good example is my sisters comment on that subject-matter. When I asked her why she thinks that topic is wired she responded: “Because people do not want to deal with something like that, since it makes them become scared”. Which is true and from what I heard from the interviews the only reason for people to really think about that issue is when a particularly good or a particularly bad thing happens. Those experiences can be the birth of your child, a funeral or a near death incident. What that means for my intended designed experience is that I want to think in different directions: How can digital assets be saved, stored and curated in way that is not awe-inspiring? So I want to look into designed experience that are maybe not directly related to death, but rewarding in a short space of time. Maybe there is even a tangible way to encourage people to delve into their personal digital assets.

The relationship between digital and physical mementos made me think in a different direction when Elliott my thesis advisor asked: “Your little sheep: what if you kept photos of your sheep on facebook?” I always thought about the object as something that carries data or memories, but what happens if the object itself is digital but maintains the same meaning as a physical object. So I wonder if there are digital mementos and how do they become such thing? During my research I recognized how one participant mentioned that he would scan his artwork and his sketchbooks because he wants to have a digital collection of it. He mentioned that his artwork is “pretty important” to him, because he gave some of his artwork away as a gift and that makes “the scans all I have left of the work I have done”. This example shows how ownership and a story (to remember) attached might affect the importance of digital mementos. This brings me back to the two big questions I am facing in order to design meaningful legacy: The What and the Why?

It is important to know what one wants to inherit to the next generation but it is also important to be aware that this next generation probably wants to know why this was bequeath to them. There is a big connection between the story of things and the actual things, and by things I do not only mean digital data but also physical objects that are connected to the digital. Further research in that direction took me to already existing webservices like Tales of Things, StickyBits and Itizen. Like local based social networks these services focus on giving a voice and a meaning to physical objects in our world with the intent to build a social network around them. I agree with Richard MacManus that there might be no value in forming a social network around a object. Nevertheless, I believe that there is a rich value for ones family, close friends and surely the next generation to hear those stories to understand beloved ones better.