Mortality infrastructure
Dying is one of the most human thresholds we cross, and one of the least designed for.
This stream brings design to deathcare: how a person remains present to their own dying, how communities hold grief, and what spaces and systems worthy of that threshold would look like. The Mortality Commons lives here. It is threshold work, and it is done with tenderness.
01. The Anatomy of Death in America
Completed | Essay
Where This Began
Most of us plan a wedding in detail and leave our own death to chance. Only one in three people have an advance directive. Fewer have said aloud how they want to be cared for at the end, or what should happen after. So when death comes, the people left behind meet it as logistics: forms, costs, decisions in a fog, grief crowded out by the scramble.
This was the first thing I studied, years ago. It is where the rest of the work began.
The question underneath it: what would let us speak of death before it arrives?
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Where This Began
Most of us plan a wedding in detail and leave our own death to chance. Only one in three people have an advance directive. Fewer have said aloud how they want to be cared for at the end, or what should happen after. So when death comes, the people left behind meet it as logistics: forms, costs, decisions in a fog, grief crowded out by the scramble.
This was the first thing I studied, years ago. It is where the rest of the work began.
The question underneath it: what would let us speak of death before it arrives?
Read full paper