Memorial Design Pattern Catalogue – Design Issues for Digital Remembrance

The digitalization and commercialization of the Internet have led to a digital culture of remembrance in recent years. This change is difficult; negative examples are subject of ongoing discussions. These discussions are elucidating that the collective remembrance culture, especially within the digital domain, is a sensitive field. Currently there is no guidance available for the development of innovative concepts of digital memory products. “Best practices” collections, which might provide guidance to the development of novel products and services linked commemorative culture, are so far missing. In this paper we will describe the current status of the ongoing project Memorial Design Pattern. The presentation of the theoretical approaches to the culture of collective remembrance, the design patterns concept as well as best-practice researches initiate this work. We present the concept of a catalogue and knowledge base for best practices in the field of digital memorial design pattern. We also present our approach for the identification of patterns and a set of selected examples of design patterns in digital-media based commemorative culture. Finally, the paper provides a discussion on future work for building up a memorial design pattern repository.