Glasgow School of Art
Innovation School
Product Design
#New Culture of Acceptance about Death
I started this week with my design opportunities; a new culture of acceptance and openness about death in a family relation
New representation of being in contact with someone far away and a new representation/metaphor of death and time.
“Proper death is unrepresented and as often as we attempt it we can notice that we continue to be there as a spectator.
I started to research the history of art and design how artists have tried to represent and express death. Man is afraid of ageing, our Western society fantasizes about immortality and maintains a denial of death, which is seen as forbidden. Our modern ideal is to wake up and die in silence without realizing it. It is a quiet death and therefore acceptable to those close to the end. Our current society is an image society, we are engulfed in information and mass image, but death remains unrepresented outside of art, it is still taboo. From an early age, the child is initiated into the philosophy of love, but when a person around him dies, the older people around him will all come up with images and metaphors to explain the death. Representation and dialogue around death are essential, and the role of the artist is to express the unrepresentable through his work, finally, what is at the limit of what can be represented.
In my research around a project that represents death or what follows from it, Frank Kolkman's project creates death simulation machine using virtual reality to tackle “death anxiety”. He created a out of body experience.
#Tell Me More About Death
#Role Play and Vignette
Because I choose to focus on the terminal phase context I really needed advice so as not to be mistaken about my speech. So I had to prepare in advance questions about the impact of my choice of context and if my idea of concept on the understanding of emotions transforming into a new form of language could be interesting in this context.
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With the experts, We talked about the difficult dialogue between family and friends and staff with cancer. Jim tells us about the importance of the affordance of objects around us and this tail can bring us, like familiar feelings, for example, certain security. Leena explained to us how goodbyes between people were done by skype in this pandemic situation and how it was hard to deal with for the family and for the caregivers. Joana told us about the taboo culture of death in society and brought in the discussion the subject of media and data of deceased people, their digital heritage, what becomes of it? Jude completed my ideas on the touch crisis and that we are increasingly lacking touch, "to know how to give it and to know how to receive it". She led the discussion around the senses and how my experience could become an emotional and sensory discussion.
I looked at Kaitlynn's Vignette technique and created Alice's Vignette, my user persona. This Vignette helps me physically represent the values I associate with my user.
The Vignette technique consists of creating the environment of your user, using physical object you could find around you and deeper you go in your research and your user representation, deeper you go in the creation of new props to incorporate.