New Death's Resolution: Stimulating pre-visit reflections on End of Life questions, through a shared platform

Abstract

Death and the end of life as a conversational topic has a certain taboo surrounding it. This taboo is what the people at the Cube Design Museum are attempting to break by hosting the (Re)design Death exhibition. To aid Cube in reaching this goal, this thesis attempts to design a coherent experience that will facilitate reflection and stimulate conversation between exhibition visitors, regarding death and the end of life. Through the combination of a literature review and an interview, different visitor-types are identified. Also, three existing projects are analyzed using a four-stage interaction model, which leads to several useful insights that are integrated into the design process. By making use of a 3-phased research through design method, three separate generative group- sessions are held. From these, the first two are used to gather four key-insights about the problems surrounding death-related conversations and to generate a four-archetype model of the participants. The third session takes the form of a brainstorm to generate solutions to the previously found problems. The gathered insights from the base of the ideation process that ultimately leads to the conception of the New Death Tour, a web-based role-playing game in which the player is taken on an interactive journey through the afterlife based on the question whether he/she would want to be immortal. The design makes use of the previously mentioned 4-archetype model to structure different ideas concerning death and confronts the player with the opinions of other participants. Through two iterations of prototyping and testing, the concept is finalized and presented. Participants to the tests generally find that the tour helps to make end-of-life topics less taboo to talk about. Finally, the thesis is concluded with recommendations for further work, Such that the Cube Design Museum can make the most of the provided conceptual design.