As designers (especially while we’re in school), we see and create a lot of projects that are of ideal things for the idealized life: food delivery services, drones, and one more app for productivity.

We wanted to take on the topic of death because it’s so rarely addressed in design. We don’t think about it, we don’t talk about it, and we definitely don’t design for it.

But you see, we all die. It’s the universal experience.

We all have been or will be touched by death in our lifetime, more than once. We all experience death differently, and we all feel unprepared when it happens.

The “ultimate” user journey, based on Sara Jo Johnson’s talk “How We Die, and How We Might Die” .

OUR PROCESS

This was a project for an Experience Design class at California College of the Arts, created by Mariana Martinez, Zoe Rogers and myself.

In order to begin designing for End of Life, we had to do a lot of research — secondary research, talking to “death experts” (Hospice workers, Chaplains, Death Doulas, Social Workers and more), and we interviewed over 30 people of different ages, cultures and beliefs.

We wanted to understand what people’s relationships with death are like, what death traditions they have been brought up with, and what are their wishes for their own end of life.

Unsurprisingly, we found that Death is a wicked problem.

Death touches on several hard and complex areas in life: law, religion, psychology, healthcare, economics, societal taboos and familial customs.

We listed 16 problem areas that we’d like to tackle, and ended up narrowing those down to just a few:

End of life care, or post-death decisions are often made while being emotional vulnerable — especially when there is no advance directive in place. The Death Care Industry is opaque — There is no visibility nor explanation to the huge (and unclear) differences in cost, state & local laws, and the lack of awareness to other body disposition options that exist, beyond just cremation or burial.

Our primary insight suggests that many of these issues were alleviated when individuals close to the person who passed knew the wishes & needs of that person regarding their end of life, death and post-death.

Most conversations about those wishes happen when someone is facing death, or actively dying. But some of us don’t get to prepare — we live, and then we die.

Our goal was to initiate those conversations (and the thinking that precedes them) early — while one is alive and healthy.

INTRODUCING VESSEL

Vessel is a time based experience, designed to help people consider their wishes for end of life.

Watch the Vessel Video:

We designed the Vessel service with 2 core loops in mind, a “front-stage” loop for the Vessel participant, and another one for those backstage, operating the service.

We send the participant 6 “issues” each with different provoking objects to reflect on (art, books, video games, etc), and each with a different theme regarding the end of life experience. The boxes contain prompts, and the participant gets a few weeks to think about the questions, and send us their responses.

The Vessel Issues: