How can design manage the interplay between the artificial and natural worlds and the interaction we have with them?
For example, the collaboration or competition with AI and technology, our relationship with digital life and artificial environments, or with natural, biologic, wild systems?
Designing for Death in a Divided Future
Future Death Rites Amidst a Climate Crisis
TEAM
Hillevi Hesseldahl
CONTEXT
MFA Design Ecologies
Degree Work
2024
PROFESSORS
Martin Avila
Katja Pettersson
Designing for Death in a Divided Future explores possible future death rites amidst a climate crisis. In two scenarios, the tenets of two different societies have shaped two very different ways of approaching life and death. In the first scenario, “Gaian Sympoiesis”, a full-scale body urn brings the body back to the soil to eventually decompose and re-integrate into ecological flows. The cycles of life guide the principles of this proposal, offering a material reincarnation. In the second scenario, “Cybernetic Ascendancy”, a lifetime of a person’s digital footprint has been collected, removed, and compressed into a crystal orb. This artefact exemplifies the ideology of the mind capturing the essence of a human.
