Losing a loved one means not only saying goodbye to a person physically, but also navigating the digital legacy they leave behind. From cherished photos and social media profiles to important accounts and personal data, these digital footprints can comfort or challenge those left behind. Yet we often avoid talking about what should happen to them. The topic is emotionally sensitive, and there are few accessible tools to help.
Conversations That Matter was created to change that. It is a hybrid toolkit that combines card-based conversation prompts with a companion website. It helps palliative care patients, their families and caregivers talk openly about end-of-life wishes and make decisions about their digital legacy.
About the speakers
Muskan Jain is an Amsterdam-based designer, artist and design researcher who works on subjects people find hard to talk about: memory, ageing, digital legacy and what technology decides on people’s behalf. Her practice moves from fieldwork and interviews to prototypes and participatory installations. She holds an MSc in Digital Design from the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and a BDes in Animation Film Design from NID Ahmedabad. She is co-creator of Conversations That Matter, presented at RSD14 (OCAD University, Toronto), and creator of Memory Ball, featured in the ThingsCon RIOT Report 2025 and at Design Fair 2026 at Het Nieuwe Instituut.
Victor Jimoh is a digital designer and co-creator of Conversations That Matter, developed during the Master Digital Design at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. He led the project’s survey outreach in Nigeria and worked on the toolkit’s companion website. At Pakhuis, he co-presents the toolkit and moderates the panel conversation.
Iskander Smit is an independent researcher, designer, curator, and “critical creative”, diving deep into human-AI-things relationships. He is the founder and chair of the Cities of Things Foundation, a research program that originated at TU Delft, where he was a visiting professor. It now serves as an independent knowledge platform, collaborating with academic partners and industry. Cities of Things developed a speculative design workshop and the Wijkbot-platform for civic prototyping. Iskander is deeply involved in exploring the relationship between human and machine intelligence from a design perspective. He publishes a weekly newsletter, and is a curator and chair of ThingsCon.
Samia Shafique is a digital legacy consultant at Digital Life Legacy, the Dutch knowledge and expertise centre that helps bereaved families and professionals get safe and legally correct access to phones, accounts and digital data after a death. She brings practical, everyday experience of what digital legacy means for the people left behind.
Kanika Makhija works at the intersection of design, culture, and digital heritage. Currently, she is a Data Manager at Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, the Dutch institution for architecture, design, and digital culture, where she oversees how the collection is described, modelled, and kept findable. She comes to this role from Netwerk Digitaal Erfgoed, where she worked on metadata quality and dataset interoperability within the NDE Dataset Register. Her background spans visual arts, design history, and museum studies, alongside a longstanding interest in craft.
*More About Conversations that Matter:
Conversations That Matter is a card-based conversation toolkit with a companion website, developed as a student project during the Master Digital Design at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences by Dewi Lagerberg, Muskan Jain, Victor Jimoh and Vera Karulina. Building on existing end-of-life conversation games such as The Death Deck, The Hello Game and GoWish, it adds a focus on digital life: passwords, social media, personal data and digital keepsakes. It’s meant to help people, families and caregivers begin these conversations.
The team surveyed 190 people from diverse backgrounds and spoke with palliative care patients, loved ones and healthcare providers. Almost 60% of the people surveyed had never thought about what happens to their digital lives after death, yet more than 80% wanted to know more.
In this edition of Designing Technology for All, Muskan Jain and Victor Jimoh share the project and what they learned. That’s the starting point for a broader panel conversation with experts in digital legacy and responsible technology: What happens to our digital selves when we die? Who should decide? What role should AI play, for example in “griefbots” that imitate the dead? And what would it mean to design technology with care, right up to the end of life?
