Glasgow School of Art
Innovation School
Product Design
Frank Kolkman - "a near-death experience using virtual reality."
#Tell Me More About Death
Through my research, I realized that I didn't want to try to represent death directly but rather to create a new experience of approaching death in the form of a new language exploiting our senses and emotions. In his work Frank Kolkman is looking for the "near-death" experience. It is not to represent death is to represent an experience close to it.
#2020to2030 Death Approch Evolution
Ivor Williams
I looked at the work of Ivor Williams to enriched my research around a new approach of death in our society in 2020. Some designer and researcher like him are starting to create new experience to open people's mind on this taboo subject.
"we've come to view death as a medical failure, rather than a natural and inevitable part of life."
"Palliative care, a clinical specialism which helps those facing death to live well right up to the end, support hundreds of thousands of people in the Uk each year but receive less than 0,3% of £500 million cancer research budget -just one indicator of the death denial and avoidance in Western culture."
"There is hope, however. A growing body of scientific evidence suggests that psychedelic substances such as psilocybin - the active ingredient in so-called ‘magic mushrooms’ - could have an important role to play in addressing the psychological and spiritual aspects of care in ways that currently go unmet."
#THIS IS TO SHALL TO PASS
In an essay co-authored with Alex Evans and Casper tel Kuile, they tell us about how grieve is important, how crying collectively is important. Since 2019, Covid-19 is part of our daily life, it is a crisis of mind, also called "The world's biggest psychological experiment". Ivor Williams said,
" The nature of the crisis goes right to the core of how we live as social beings - and also we die."
He explains that
"This essay is intended as a meditation on collective grieving. We argue that in conditions of such widespread loss as the ones we now face, it’s essential that we grieve well — and that this means doing so collectively, not just on our own. But we also note that our society often struggles with grief. Instead, we often regard death as a taboo and grief as something embarrassing, to be hidden away or processed as quickly as possible."
So as well as emphasising why we need to grieve collectively, this essay is also about how we do so. They are taking inspiration from our past. "How our forebears used deep shared stories and rituals to make sense", and how we could use these stories again.
"The Collective Psychology Project is a collaborative inquiry into how psychology and politics can be brought together in new, creative ways that help us to become a Larger Us instead of a Them-and-Us."
In the reflection of this project, it is like Ivor Williams that I want to find a new form of celebration around mourning and not to remain in the taboo of this subject. I want to try to elevate the importance of death to that of life.
We spend our lives fearing and waiting for it, which is why the creation of a new, gentle dialogue that celebrates the moments preceding death is for me a way of de-dramatizing this end of life and of collectively preparing another form of mourning around this end. Conscious mourning in advance through a sensory discussion between the person who is about to die and one of his relatives. In order to become fully aware of this end of life under a softer approach that projects beyond words.
It is also important for me to represent this project in a tone of joy and celebration to life as well as to represent a sad and serious tone of equal importance. I want to represent these two contradictory emotions because quite simply they answer and exist one according to the other.