Too Cute to Cut: How Designed Things Continue after They End
HCI has studied how digital things persist (e.g., archives, versioning) and how they disappear (e.g., forgetting, unmaking). Less attention has been paid to what continues when the thing itself does not. We study this through decorated celebration cakes, whose intended use requires losing their intact form. Drawing on 11 photo-elicited client interviews and 10 autoethnographic cases from the first author's five-year cake practice, we find that cutting changes what can be valued: it enables new experiences, while aspects of the cake continue through saved decorations, memories, recurring practices, and remaking by others. We derive three principles for designing things that are meant to end: design for what the ending enables, prepare for what should remain, and shape what others can carry forward. We contribute an approach for HCI that treats endings and what continues afterward as part of design.