One afternoon at the end of April, in the middle of that pivot, Gaffney and Paul Bennett gave a short tour of the project to a man named BJ Miller.

Miller is the executive director of San Francisco’s Zen Hospice Project, which since 1987 has quietly helped pioneer the field of palliative care. Loosely defined, palliative care is an empathic approach to medicine and end-of-life care that considers the many nuanced emotional, spiritual, and physical experiences of the patient and his or her overall well-being, rather than formulaically treating a medical condition. Zen Hospice deploys a corps of more than a hundred trained volunteers into homes and at a city hospital, but its centerpiece is a tranquil six-bedroom Victorian home in Hayes Valley known as the Guest House.

The Guest House has an extraordinary feel to it, deeply spiritual without being overbearing or mushy. Residents are invited to meditate with staff and often gather in the kitchen to casually enjoy the rituals and smells of cooking, even if they’re unable to eat. Miller told me he recently supported the decision of a woman at the Guest House with terminal cancer to start smoking again — as he explained it, it was worth it for her to feel and use the very lungs she was losing; it deepened her experience of letting go. In short, Miller explained, Zen Hospice’s power comes from recognizing that “dying is a human act, not just a medical one.”

Miller had been introduced to Ideo about a year earlier, and quickly achieved a kind of guru status among many at the firm. (“He came in and everyone instantly fell in love with him,” one Ideo staffer told me.) He is 44 and preternaturally poised, the sort of person who, after speaking about death and dying on a public-radio call-in show last year, not only read the comments that poured onto the show’s site later, but responded, compassionately, to each one. In person he is blessed with a blazing magnetism that can’t be overstated — a recent acquaintance described him to me, only half jokingly, as “the most magnificent human in the world” — and could pass easily as a Hollywood leading man, with tousled, slightly silvering dark hair and a dimpled grin. He is also missing half of his left arm and has two prosthetic legs.

In 1990, while an undergraduate at Princeton, Miller was out late with some friends and decided, for the fun of it, to climb atop an electric train car. The electrical current arced from a piece of equipment into his wristwatch, sending 11,000 volts through his arm and out his feet, nearly killing him. (Miller still wears the watch occasionally; it works.)

His recovery was long and taxing, but the injury intensified his intellectual curiosity about death and suffering. When Miller returned to school, he began studying art history, fascinated by how artists make sense of the darkness and pain of the human experience. Then, after playing volleyball in the Paralympic Games and founding a tea company, he went to medical school and eventually found his calling in palliative care, especially for terminal patients. (He still practices medicine part-time at ucsf .) Miller felt he was uniquely qualified. “A lot of physicians will work their whole life on a disease that they’ll never have,” he says. Miller, at least, had come as close to dying as anyone could.

Paul Bennett was drawn to Miller immediately. Miller was a physician, intimately familiar with how bodies fail and shut down, but he’d also spent the two decades since his accident attuning himself to the same aesthetic dimensions and deficiencies of the dying process that Bennett was now obsessed with. That is, Miller had a profound head start when it came to redesigning death, and he and Bennett quickly fell into a wide-ranging dialogue. In an email to Bennett early last year, for example, Miller wrote: “I’d say that humans have thrived by turning every need — every vulnerability — into something in its own right.” Shelter becomes architecture, he noted. Reproduction gets wrapped in romance and love. And “think of all the cultural significance and artistry and labor that goes into [eating].” Miller wanted to bring that same creative power and meaning-making to death, but he had trouble finding a sounding board for those ideas in the medical community. He was as grateful to find Bennett as Bennett was to find him.

Last February, Bennett invited Miller to an orientation for a small team of Ideo designers on the work he was hoping to undertake. Because it felt wrong to talk about death in a conference room, some junior designers took it upon themselves to build a Death Yurt at the center of Ideo’s studio — a black, candlelit enclosure reachable only by crawling through a long, dark tunnel. (“It was like a sweat lodge,” Bennett says.) As homework, Bennett had asked everyone to design their own funeral, and he kicked off the discussion. He explained he’s always been terrified by the knowledge that he’ll die alone. (Bennett’s partner is 15 years older than he is, and they have no children.) But lately he had been reshaping the image in his mind. If he was going to die alone, he said, he’d like to do it outside, in Iceland, under the quivering brilliance of the Northern Lights.

Huddled in the Death Yurt, Miller felt simultaneously invigorated and dubious. On the one hand, this was precisely the sort of more joyous conversation he wanted to encourage people to have long in advance of their own deaths. (“I felt like I was watching Paul be converted to the possibilities,” he says.) Miller had seen firsthand that, because we spend our entire lives avoiding thinking about death, when it finally comes into view, there’s a thicket of panic, denial, or disbelief to cut through before people can focus, more mindfully, on the experience and begin to make decisions to improve their last days. Then, of course, you still have to reconcile those hopes with the exigencies of the health care system, which can be torturously inflexible. When you sit with a dying person, Miller says, “Time is always in the room. … At best, you’re able to salvage some peace or comfort for a moment.”

And yet Miller also knew that these more imaginative conversations about death needed to be channeled in just the right way. In the Death Yurt, Bennett and his team seemed to be caught up in what Miller recognized as the “endocrine rush” of finally facing death head-on. That exuberance, while helpful, needs to be moved past; otherwise, it can wind up derailing more practical conversations, or alienating people on aesthetic or socioeconomic grounds. For one thing, Miller later told me, “Paul’s Iceland idea presupposes you can time all that” — that you could fly him over and wheel him out at just the right moment, then cue the Lights. “You don’t want to shit on somebody’s beautiful idea,” Miller said, but “if you start talking about dying well or dying a ‘good death,’ then you also set people up to fail at death.”

Miller seemed to bring that same sobering perspective to his tour of the After I Go workshop. At one point, the lead Ideo designer on the project, Denise Burchell, was talking him through a potential After-Gifting feature the team would eventually call Remembrance Maps: walking tours of sentimental locations, left to loved ones either as actual maps or location-based software. For example, your deceased grandfather could ping you to suggest you go sit on a particular park bench where he and your grandmother used to enjoy the view, 300 yards from where you’re standing. The power of features like this, Burchell explained, was that you wouldn’t be showering your loved ones with “generic memories” but “personally relevant ones.” “These,” she said, “are your memories.”

“Can I ask you a question?” Miller interjected politely. “The quest for immortality in general is very problematic,” he began. He seemed to be feeling the same mix of hopefulness and ambivalence he’d experienced in the Death Yurt. He wanted to know if they’d thought through the implications of catering to what, essentially, is our narcissism. Fundamentally, Miller’s work is about helping people let go of that fierce attachment to the self — the urge to hang on to it at all costs. Was Gaffney’s team finding they could tap into that impulse in a purely positive way? “Is there something good in that compulsion?” he asked.

Burchell seemed taken aback by the question. They hadn’t launched the app yet, not even in beta. “At this point,” she said, “we just have hunches.”