40 slides
One of the things that threw me the most in going to different funerals for friends and family was how there was usually a PowerPoint deck. It always seemed out of place. A projector was cabled to an open laptop in the middle of a room and projecting on a wall. It was sometimes tilted, sometimes out of focus, but it was always there. There were usually people standing around it, watching the slides move forward, and speaking about the slides.
I think about it a lot. I think about what a strange way it’s evolved to capture a life. It’s difficult to go through the grieving process and want to encapsulate someone and then represent them for others to see. You want to show them when they were young, when they were old, when they were happy, their achievements, their loves, their hobbies… You want to show the world “them”. And you want to grab those images and save the for yourself. It becomes an act of materialization and slight desperation as you try to get photos from their phones, from their apps, from Facebook, from Instagram, and from the physical ones laying around the houses of those they interacted with. You become a collector, and in the process of collecting, you hope to build a life from these parts and pieces. You compile a gestalt mosaic of this life because you want others to see the person you knew and that they knew, and maybe even show them a person that they didn’t know.
And so you ask for photos and stories, and you try and put them together, but nothing is sufficient. Nothing really captures a life, and while PowerPoint is a decent tool, at each point where I’ve seen this happen, I’ve thought that there must be a better way.
Just to be transparent, this isn’t a shot at PowerPoint or Microsoft. I recognize fully that PowerPoint gives almost anybody the tools they need to put photos in an order and then play them on a loop without interruption. It’s a simple thing that everyone can use. I think it speaks volumes for the grieving process that people are so motivated to try and capture and display a life that they’ll turn to something like PowerPoint to represent a person. Whether or not it’s the best software for the job, it’s the one that people have turned to. And Microsoft has recognized this with the templates they provide online to build these presentations, featuring the slide above with the peonies and thistle.
At one of the funerals I attended, this deck was only 40 slides. It’s hard in those moments to not feel both connected to that number and sad by it. I don’t discount the person and what they were going through to put the deck together. Like most people at that time of grief, they are rushed and stressed and emotionally exhausted, but they doing their best to keep themselves together while capturing a life in this deck. But it’s hard to think that a friend’s life on display was only this deck of 40 slides; and it’s hard not to think that those slides will one day be me or my wife or my kids. I think they deserve better, and maybe I do as well.
As Facet grows, I’d like for it to be not only a way for people to continually add to who this person was but also maybe export that information in a way where others can view it or play it. I imagine a way to capture a life and then let someone easily move through the timeline to create a video or gallery presentation and then play that on a projector or TV or whatever they prefer. Maybe even a way to make multiple presentations easily.
Additionally, Facet serves as a place to keep those memories and those presentations permanently so that anyone can view them, from now until the end of the app, maybe 100s of years if we can figure out a way to make them portable and easy to transfer to future formats. I’ve had my gmail account for 20 years now, and I don’t see that I’ll stop using it anytime soon, so maybe there’s hope for that level of longevity.
