Essay
Yasuyuki Hayama*1, Ammer Harb1
1Department of Design, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy
Abstract
What alternative narratives can be imagined for the future of death? This essay aims to conceptualize the term “More-Than-Death” depending on an urgent concept of “More-Than-Human”. By revisiting “tabooed death” from a speculative design, the authors consider the possibility to release the death argument from “life exceptionalism,” reconsidering the meaning and relationship of life and death and, more broadly, death and others’ life and earth. It is true that discussing death itself can be naïve, and the relationship between death and life must be discussed carefully. However, it is also necessary to consider the various negative possibilities of turning away from the discussion of death and stopping to think about it. We propose a speculative design perspective because it is concerned with the consequences and implications of today’s actions on the future of humanity. Consequently, this paper attempts to interrogate the tabooed topic of death from critical and speculative standpoints and to cross the boundaries of controversy between death and life in design.
Keywords
More-Than-Death, More-Than-Human, Speculative Design, Anthropocene, Narratives of Change (NoC)
The aim of this essay: conceptualization of “MORE-THAN-DEATH”
This essay aims to conceptualize the term “More-Than-Death” depending on an urgent concept of “More-Than-Human.” By revisiting “tabooed death” from a speculative design perspective, the authors consider the possibility to release the death argument from “life exceptionalism,” reconsidering the meaning and relationship of life and death and, more broadly, death and others’ life and earth. It must be acknowledged that tabooed death might cause excessive life exceptionalism, which might trigger a cessation of thought on various issues related to life and death, thereby closing the opportunity for macro and multilateral discussions on life and death for the realization of a globally sustainable future society (Ellyard, 2011). It is true that discussing death itself can be naïve, and the relationship between death and life must be discussed carefully. However, it is also necessary to consider the various negative possibilities of turning away from the discussion of death and stopping to think about it.
This paper first reviews the existing debate on the “tabooing of death” and points out that life is, therefore, under excessive exceptionalism as a human activity. Next, the current status of the concept of death in design research is reviewed. In parallel, the authors shed light on critical and speculative design as critical future practices that might problematize the concept of More-Than-Death. Critical design practices are concerned with questions about the future and proposing an alternative vision for a more sustainable future. We see these critical practices as an approach to tackling the controversial topic of death, which can provide space for designers to re-examine the relationship between life and death.
We propose a speculative design because it is concerned with the consequences and implications of today’s actions. Death, a tabooed topic, is often overlooked by designers, although it has a significant impact on our future. The future of humanity, co-existence, and living with the other than humans are all connected, and this is where researchers see speculative design as an exploratory, investigative, and propositional approach to More-Than-Death. The authors address this in the Discussion section with regard to design practice and design education.
Consequently, this paper attempts to interrogate the tabooed topic of death from a speculative design perspective and to cross the boundaries of controversy between death and life in design.
“Tabooed death” as “life exceptionalism”
The notion that death is taboo is often mentioned in modern society. McGoldrick (2004) states that “death is a central experience of life, one that the dominant American culture has not dealt with very well.” Even if death is a core life experience, people are generally rarely willing to consider and confront it during their lives.
Reviewing academic heritage of death, Rothaupt and Becker (2007) insist on how limited research on death and bereavement has been since the epoque-making book The Meaning of Death, edited by Feifel (1959), and that clinicians and researchers still struggle to understand death, dying, and bereavement almost 50 years later. Rothaupt and Becker (2007) conclude that the theoretical foundations of bereavement are in a state of flux, with the current research questioning the previous assumptions. Therefore, by challenging previous beliefs taken as fact, new methodologies provide an in-depth exploration of the art and transformation of bereavement.
In Western sociology, the tabooing of death has been classically examined, and several formulations have been made. According to Goller (1965) and Ariès (1975,1977), in the West, the tabooization of death began at the beginning of the twentieth century, especially after World War I (Sawai, 2002). Goller (1965) deals with bereavement, while Ariès (1975, 1977) adds hospital, funeral, and daily conversation scenes. Furthermore, while summarizing the classical formulations of Goller and Ariès, Mellor and Shilling (1993) summarize the organization of society around death with the thesis of “Public Absence-Private Presence” of death (Sawai, 2002).
There is another general formulation, especially in the West. It is the argument that the fear of death—and therefore the attempt to deny it—is a universal trait of the human psyche. A representative example of this argument is The Denial of Death (1973) by Becker, who won the Pulitzer Prize in the United States. According to his argument, the driving force of all human activities is the denial of one’s own death, and nationalism, sexuality, religion, career, creative activities, etc. are all activities that attempt to gain immortality or something close to it in a symbolic form and bring death down to consciousness.
More recently, in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic, Italian philosopher Agamben expressed his strong discomfort with the situation in which so many people were buried without funeral rites in the wake of the disaster. He stated the following:
“The dead – our dead – have no right to a funeral, and we do not know what will happen to the bodies of our loved ones. Our neighbors are being obliterated, and it is strange that the Church is silent on this issue. What will happen to our relationships in a country that will never be used to this kind of life? What is society that finds no value in anything other than survival?” (Agamben, 2020)
By overlooking the above series of discussions, one may conclude that death’s confinement into a tabooed box is socially pervasive and that humans are justified in focusing their activities on life. In other words, this can lead to “life exceptionalism” so to speak. While we must be careful about making the proposition that there is something more important than life, as it may induce various dangers, it is also problematic to preclude the opportunity to consider death by making it a taboo subject. For example, borrowing from Agamben’s concepts of “zoe” and “bios” (Agamben, 1998), we might broadly allow the existence of beings who merely live a bare life “zoe,” and we might even erase consideration of life as “bios,” which we live well. Therefore, by liberating death from the taboo, we may think about the social life of human beings, how to live a better life, and even the relationships among death, human-beings, non-human beings, and the earth.
Contemporary discussion of “death” in design studies and potential of speculative design
From a design perspective, perceptions of death should be challenged, shifted, and revised. Death has rarely been discussed in design studies, and design contributions are extremely rare. Farnaz Nickpour (2019), a design scholar who is interested in the design for the end of life, notes that the design for death proposals is “interventional, fantastical, object-oriented, and lacking in a critical approach” (Tibbles & Nickpour, 2020) and that “design contributions in end-of-life are rather limited in scope and depth, disjointed, and mainly operational and incremental, in form of interventions and initiatives” (Nickpour, 2019).
In the same discussion, Hamraie (2017) emphasizes that design should abandon the interventional perspective toward death or design for the end of life. It should situate critical discourses and restructure the material-discursive world of death. Design is still underdeveloped in terms of understanding and interrogating the taboo topic of death, and it still focuses on object-oriented design approaches, as Tibbles and Nickpour (2020) identify: (a) the design of the deathbed, (b) the design of the coffin, and (c) the design of the funeral.
Nickpour (2019) emphasizes this point by stating that contributions to the design of death fail to consider three fundamental aspects: (1) the critical perspective in researching the end of life, (2) future vision and opportunity mapping, and (3) innovative approaches and impactful design proposals. The authors respond to the first point by introducing speculative design as a possible critical future approach for developing a discursive approach to end-of-life design.
It seems sensible to define speculative design here. It can be considered a subsidiary or transformative version of Dunne and Raby’s 2000 critical design practice (Dunne, 1999), and it is an important and pivotal intellectual practice when discussing the overlap between criticality and futures. It was first introduced in Dunne and Raby’s work in the definition of “Critical Design,” which they define as follows: “Critical Design uses speculative design proposals to challenge narrow assumptions, preconceptions, and givens about the role products play in everyday life.”
This term is further articulated in Speculative Everything (2013), which is a key reference in speculative design. Dunne and Raby identify speculative design as “By moving upstream and exploring ideas before they become products or even technologies, designers can look into the possible consequences of technological applications before they happen. We can use speculative designs to debate potential ethical, cultural, social, and political implications.” In this definition, they focus on the function of exposing the implications and consequences that design actions might cause; this is the core function when discussing criticality and futures.
Influential scholar and designer James Auger (2014) draws a compelling list of aspects for the function of speculative design, arguing that it borrows from other established adjacent fields such as industrial or graphic design but that speculative design “as a form of enquiry” does abandon the market imperatives to create an area where design could
- arrange emerging (not yet available) technological “elements” to hypothesize future products and artifacts, or
- apply alternative plans, motivations, or ideologies to those currently driving technological development in order to facilitate new arrangements of existing elements, and
- develop new perspectives on big systems
- asking “what is a better future (or present)?”
- generating a better understanding of the potential implications of a specific (disruptive) technology in various contexts and on multiple scales – with a particular focus on everyday life.
- moving design “upstream” – to not simply package technology at the end of the technological journey but to impact and influence that journey from its genesis.
From this list of functions, speculative design can be interpreted as an ideological and intellectual practice that not only aims to produce provocative design output but also maps the systemic view in which design is positioned, as well as the implications and consequences of design actions.
Adding to Auger’s list, a fundamental function and characteristic of speculative design is to create public debate on social or technological issues. Speculative design involves two different types of audiences: experienced practitioners and everyday users (or the general public) (Pierce, 2015). Its designs are designed for dissemination and engagement with users as they are meant to circulate through various channels, such as magazines, exhibitions, or the Internet. Each of these channels has its own means of dissemination and communication: they can be sophisticated, elite, popular, and accessible. Yet, “the best speculative designs do more than communicate; they suggest possible uses, interactions, and behaviors that are not always obvious at a quick glance” (Dunne & Raby, 2013).
In light of the preceding discussion, we propose that the critical approach to interrogating the design for death be accomplished through a speculative design lens. Speculative design could catalyze and facilitate the unfolding of future scenarios of current practices about the end of life; it could be an opportunity to open up a debate and discourse about the future social quandary and map different alternative visions of the “More-Than-Death” concept. It could problematize its future consequences and implications as well as identify propositional stances on how design and death could be aligned for better and more sustainable futures.
Proposing the concept of “More-Than-Death”
The above is an overview of the fact that death has been regarded as a taboo subject that may have sealed off various possibilities for consideration. Meanwhile, in design studies, even though contemporary arguments regarding death are rarely seen, it is underlined that design approaches such as critical speculative design may have a high potential for problematizing its future consequences and implications and for identifying prepositional stances of how design and death could be aligned for a better and sustainable future.
Hence, the authors propose the concept of “More-Than-Death” to reconsider death from life exceptionalism. That of “More-Than-Death” is a concept that comprehends the primaeval relationship between life and death, reversing the idea of life exceptionalism, if we refer to the conceptual origin of the term “More-Than-Human.” To conceptualize this “More-Than-Death,” it is useful to review contemporary arguments regarding “More-Than-Human.”
Reviewing contemporary arguments of More-Than-Human
That of “More-Than-Human” is a concept that embraces the primordial relationality and interdependence of all living beings, debunking the concept of human exceptionalism. This concept attempts to reconstruct the boundaries between the familiar binaries of human and nonhuman, culture and nature, and human and animals that have dominated Western thinking since at least the Enlightenment (Forlano, 2017; Akama, Light, & Kamihira, 2020).
In the wake of often unexpected and brutal feedback from nature—frequent flooding, heat waves, tornadoes, cyclones, or heavy rains—the positioning or conceptualization of “More-Than-Human” entities has been underlined in several disciplines, such as urban planning, community development, policymaking, and design (Akama, Light, & Kamihira, 2020; Jon, 2020). With related concepts such as the nonhuman, the multispecies, the Anthropocene, the more than human, the transhuman, and the decentering of the human, the More-Than-Human concept greatly expands our understanding of the multiple agencies, dependencies, entanglements, and relations that constitute our world (Forlano, 2017).
The background is the shared sense of the problem that a human-dominant worldview can no longer sustain a sustainable world. In particular, the study of human–environment relations in geography has gone through a dizzy series of theoretical, philosophical, and methodological transformations in the past 20 years, with the matter of “nature” being neglected in radical geography and human geography as a whole. Today, fierce debates swirl about the epistemological and ontological status of “nature,” about how best to understand the production of “socionature” in an age of globalized capitalism, and about how we should understand our ethical-political commitments in a world in which social life is always “More-Than-Human” (Bruce, 2005; Whatmore, 2006).
In the field of design studies, this concept has become increasingly important as an opportunity to rethink dominant human-centered design approaches since the 1980s (Forlano, 2017; Jain, 2018; Akama, Light, & Kamihira, 2020).
Conceptualizing “More Than Death”
Referring to the contemporary arguments of “More-Than-Human” as counterarguments to human exceptionalism and the excessive human-centered approach under the urgent demands of a sustainable world, the concept of “More-Than-Death” can emerge accordingly as a counterargument to “tabooed death,” which can trigger life exceptionalism.
The “More-Than-Death” concept embraces the essential relationality and interdependence of life and death, doubting the idea of excessive life exceptionalism. This concept attempts to deconstruct the boundaries between the familiar binaries of life and death and the world of the life and world of the dead by problematizing the current situation in which death is tabooed generally and academically and unconsciously given less attention.
Lest we, like Agamben’s lament, fall into the trap of thinking about the current situation in which the mass deaths from COVID-19 are being buried without funeral rites, the concept of More-Than-Death can greatly expand our understanding of the dependencies, entanglements, and relations between life and death that constitute our world.
Underlying this is the recognition that a worldview that considers death taboo and turns away from the subject of thought may no longer make sense of dignified human life and death. Möller and Schilling argue that, in contemporary society, death has been excluded from the public sphere and reassigned to the private sphere. The decline of the religious order that once provided people with “ontological security” by “liberating them from witchcraft” has resulted in the loss of the public meaning of death and the diversification of approaches to death. Since the existential anxiety evoked by death can no longer be dealt with in the public sphere, death is excluded from the public sphere and relegated to the private sphere, where the public gaze does not extend. In this “privatization” of death, people are left alone to face their existential anxieties, such as the fear of emptiness after death (Mellor, 1993; Mellor & Shilling, 1993). Such a context may lead to the exclusion of publicly discussing death and even thinking about how to live and die with dignity.
In addition to the micro perspective about the life and death of each individual, it is also important to take a more macro perspective on the life and death of all lives, including human beings, on a global and cosmic scale, and to consider them from a longer-term perspective rather than a short-term timeframe in the cyclic system of life and death. This will open our thinking to recognizing the importance of reflecting upon the connection between life and death that transcends time and space.
Discussion
In this paper, the authors derived the provocative concept of “More-Than-Death.” It was suggested possibilities to reconsider the relationship between life and death from both micro and macro perspectives, that is, from the perspective of the individual and the social group, from the time axis of a single life, and from the time axis of the ecosystem and the earth. The background of this concept refers to finding an opportunity to break free from the current situation in which death is considered taboo, resulting in the oversaturation of bare life, as Agamben calls it, and in the neglect of socially meaningful life that can be created by paying respect to death.
It is precisely because we are in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis and numerous political conflicts in the world, where death is so close to us on a global scale, and precisely because we must protect not only human life but also non-human life and life on Earth, as the global environment is being loudly called out, that we must not turn away from the consideration of death. We do not intend to express the dangerous idea that these things take precedence over life; however, because we are in a situation where death is extremely taboo and, as a result, “bios” is not neglected, that we must have the courage to think about death and rethink the relationship between life and death from multiple perspectives.
At a time when death is so close at hand and yet considered a taboo subject, it may be necessary to make a paradigm shift in the way we think about death. Forming the Narrative of Change (NoC; Wittmayer et al., 2019), as Futurology has shown, an NoC by design may create an opportunity for people to think about a new paradigm of life and death (Hayama & Zurlo, 2020). From the viewpoint of design studies and future studies, design may offer a possibility for the future by introducing a certain new view of life and death.
Design for death as a future-oriented concept should cross the boundaries and realms of functionality. It is not about designing services for bereaving or decoratively designing coffins; it should be more of a visionary and critical approach to map and identify possible innovations that are impactful to humanity as well as highlight the negative consequences and implications of how we currently deal with the end of life. Design for design should consider humans among other-than-humans and not in a superior position; it should refer to the post-Anthropocene discourse and to how humans should react differently in the future.
Our argument is that designers should be courageous to tackle tabooed concepts such as death; it is not about death itself but about dealing with a sensitive and emotional state that is usually overlooked. Reflecting upon practice and education, “More-Than-Death” could be seen as a fundamental issue that should be introduced in educational curricula and design studios, aiming to shift the paradigm of design toward topics that affect not only our social life but also the environment as a whole, aiming to achieve more sustainable futures. Therefore, speculative design can be a possible approach to facilitate this paradigm shift and mindset transformation. Its boldness to question sensitive topics is a catalyst for change that should be actively incorporated when studying various future scenarios of end-of-life, or to create an alternative view of designing for death from a positive perspective and for designers to begin to become familiar with it. Future-oriented design practices are not about predicting the future; they are about the change needed to achieve better futures. It helps the public make future concepts—even the most sensitive and provocative ones—tangible, and it facilitates the process of introducing controversial and wild futures concepts to the public since they could viscerally interact with them.
However, most importantly, the very act of discussing death is naïve, and the idea of life and death is fraught with risk. As Rothaupt and Becker (2007) conclude, bereavement research is entering a new dawn. Through careful and in-depth interdisciplinary discussions, new methodologies will provide a deeper exploration of the art and transformation of bereavement. Through these developments, we may be able to think and act better so that those in mourning can embrace wisdom and affirm their own lives and those of their deceased loved ones.
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