Challenge
This project sought to spark personal reflection and a deeper sense of civic connectedness by presenting history not as a fixed record but as a participatory and evolving dialogue.
Solution
Gobituary Rekindled is a hybrid digital-physical history project that invites university community members to engage with the legacy of individuals who shaped the early development of UC Berkeley. By learning about the lives of those who made a mark on their communities (for better or for worse), users are encouraged to consider their own stories and how they, too, might shape the future of their institutions and neighborhoods.
Contributions
Look and Feel, Logo Design, Website Design, Graphic Design, Research, Construction
This project was completed as part of the final project for UC Berkeley's MIMS program. The project was advised by Coye Chesire and Stefanie Hutka, and the team members involved (aside from myself) were Anna Lanzino, Lei Zhang, and Ria Antony. More information about Gobituary Rekindled can be found here.
Motivations
This project is an extention of the Gobituary website (created by Anna Lanzino), and similarly seeks to enhance understanding of local history. As a group, we all found a strong interest in cemeteries and how they can operate as museums. In fact, many historic cemeteries offer tours that are very informative and worthwhile! We saw this as an opportunity for exploration.
Since convincing people that cemeteries are actually super cool is a tall task (and I doubt my attempt two sentences ago convinced you), we chose to bring the cemetery to campus instead. However, rather than the broader surrounding community as a whole, Gobituary Rekindled's target audience is university students who routinely have weaker ties to their community due to the transient nature of their residency in college towns.
Collage
Each individual collage for the ten chosen historical figures include information that would be typical of a gravestore, such as the birth and death years, and text similar to an epitaph. They also include various images that hint or give context to their contributions to the community. In cemetery tours, docents will typically share short stories about the deceased rather than provide a full biography. Similarly, we wanted to differentiate the presentation of accomplishments from what would be standard in a history book and highlight the still-felt residual effects of their involvement or contributions to the UC Berkeley campus.
Lastly, to highlight their affiliations to the university, the palette was constrained to blue and yellow, a nod to the university's colors. The design heavily incorporates light motifs in reference to the university's slogan “fiat lux” (“let there be light”), and the quilt motif was inspired by the AIDS Memorial Quilt which also sought to humanize community members by using small snapshots of life to assemble an entire tapestry of human connection. The quilt pattern in particular is commonly known as bear tracks, which, of course, reference's the university's mascot.
