Death and design: the creative projects confronting society’s ultimate taboo

The visual language of death has stagnated, and creatives have a vital role to play in how future generations face its complex subjects. Here, we chat to a design research practice dedicated to death, and delve into some of the topics covered at their recent conference, from symbols of death and branding the end of life, to ‘traumacore’.

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Strong content warning: this article explores many sensitive topics, including death, assisted suicide, self-harm and environmental catastrophe.

Death: it’s a topic that often feels like no one really wants to talk about. Especially, that is, in the buttoned-up culture of avoiding difficult topics that the UK is so well known for. But whether we like it or not, death is something every single person will deal with in their lifetime, and one day encounter themselves.

Despite the UK’s lingering attitude of evasion, you may have noticed that over the past few years the ethical debate around death has been increasingly making its way into our news cycle. By the day the UK looks closer and closer to passing a bill which will legalise assisted dying, with numerous high profile figures (like the late actress Diana Rigg who suffered what she described as a “dehumanising battle” with cancer) campaigning for a relaxation of the law. What’s more, burgeoning technologies seem to be having an impact on the way we consider mortality; earlier this year, the artist and musician Laurie Anderson admitted she was “addicted” to an AI chatbot that mimicked her late husband, the musician Lou Reed. Clearly, the way we think about death, grief and commemoration are ever-changing, but what role can design play in helping these new narratives visually and physically come to life?

“It’s not really possible to come up with a single symbol of death, because there’s so many individual interpretations.”

Ashley Rudolph
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Moth: Good Grief (Copyright © Moth)

While most people find the subject of death difficult to address, some people have spent years, or even their whole careers, staring it right in the face. Take Nicola Salkeld and Ashley Rudolph, the duo behind Moth – a design-focused research project that challenges attitudes, conventions and contexts surrounding death and dying. Now in motion for 13 years, the project has seen the pair collaborate with those you might not traditionally expect designers to work with, like palliative care doctors and cultural historians, and swap design events for conferences all about mortality – often being the only designers in the room.

What makes Moth stand out – other than its subject matter – is the fact that the vast majority of the research is conducted with students; both Nicola and Ashley are senior design lecturers at Falmouth University. In fact, one of Moth’s earliest and longest running projects Symbols of Death arose after a conversation with one of their students. The student from Norway had opened up to Ashley and Nicola about expression of grief after the Utøya massacre and felt there was an acute lack of accurate and sensitive symbolism to encapsulate or respond to the event online. Symbols like the thumbs-up to like an image, and the heart symbol, felt wrong, and empathetically insufficient.

In response, Nicola and Ashley put on a workshop with their students to find out if there was such a thing as a singular, universal symbol of grief. “We were exploring whether you could come up with a symbol of death that could describe that level of empathy and which the other symbols, like skull and crossbones, just didn’t,” says Ashley. “In the workshop, we discovered that, no, it’s not really possible to come up with a single symbol of death, because there’s so many individual interpretations.” Struck by this, Nicola and Ashley realised just how much work there was to be done in exploring the visual symbolism of death, fuelling their desire to make Moth into something much bigger, and much broader.

In its 13 years, Moth’s projects have ranged greatly. For example, Goodbye Mr Jim, Ashley explains, tackles the death of a family pet. “How can we equip parents to be able to talk about the loss of a child’s pet, as it’s often the first time they’ve confronted death?” explains Ashley. So often you hear instances of parents avoiding the topic entirely (eg. “they’ve gone to live on a farm”). Moth created a downloadable pamphlet that guides parents on how they can help their child’s understanding, as well as an A4 print-out (which can be personalised and stuck on a shoebox containing the animal) creating a sense of ceremony and celebration. Another project, Another Seat at the Table, is a designed dining experience complete with a curated menu and set of prompts that pushes people to plan for what might happen in the instance of their death. “We plan for all big events in our life – like a wedding and our 21st birthday – but actually, we don’t do that planning for the end of life.” says Ashley. “Design can shift that narrative and shift that status quo.”

Recently, Moth staged a conference: Death Design and Culture: Radical Reimaginings for the End of Life, at Falmouth’s campus. The event, brought together individuals specialising in death across various disciplines, from designers to academics, researchers and policy-makers, to discuss the most complex issues and debates surrounding the passing of life, from funeral practices, assisted dying, ecological collapse and death in a digital world.

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Copyright © Moth

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Copyright © Moth

The opening keynote was from Laura Cramwinckel, the head of programme and research at Museum Tot Zover (Museum So Long) in Amsterdam, a space dedicated to exploring funeral practices and the culture surrounding them. It’s held exhibitions on everything from the design of herses, to different cultural approaches to death, as well hosting some striking permanent features, like a series of commemorative post-mortem portraits, and one particularly clever student project submitted to the museum – a plywood coffin paired with a pamphlet designed to look like an IKEA manual, that museum-goers can enter, thus (quite literally) confronting death head on.

Laura explored how the museum has gone about branding itself asking: how do you signal that everything inside these doors deals with death, while still making people want to visit? Tot Zover’s answer was to get the “trendiest” design agency in the Netherlands, KesselsKramer, to redesign its logo and create an ad campaign. The studio turned the two T’s in its name into two crosses – a symbol Laura argued has become detached from Christianity, and is now a widely perceived symbol of death (at least in Europe) – and placed a headstone outside the Rijksmuseum inscribed with the question: ‘Who’s still afraid of death?’. It was provocative, considering that (according to Laura) one in three Dutch people attest to experiencing death anxiety, but brought a new tone of voice to the subject matter.

When the museum decided it needed a mascot to make the space more palatable to children, it opted for quite a cutesy grim reaper figure, called Klein Hein – another universal symbol, or so they thought. When trialled with children, many had no clue what a grim reaper was, let alone why he was holding a big knife, which for them denoted violence. So, in 2018, the museum remedied this by replacing Klein Hein’s scythe with a flower – which proved a success. Laura learnt that symbols of death are always changing – one generation’s cheeky grim reaper is altogether more macabre in today’s context.

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Moth: Saying Goodbye to Mr Jim (Copyright © Moth)

“We plan for all big events in our life – like a wedding and our 21st birthday – but actually, we don’t do that planning for the end of life.”

Ashley Rudolph
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Copyright © Museum Tot Zover

Arguably one of the most complicated subjects surrounding death is that of assisted suicide. For decades the debate has been a fierce one, with activists and charities – like Dignity in Dying – fighting to give people the right to decide when their life ends. In Canada, Switzerland, Belgium and some states in the US, voluntary suicide is already legal, with the UK’s new Labour government looking set to follow suit. However, this stance has been met with equally vehement opposition from many parties, including religious figures and disabled activists who believe such a bill will pressure already vulnerable disabled people to opt for ending their life. The actor and activist Liz Carr’s documentary on BBC iPlayer, Better off Dead?, is a thought-provoking examination of this side of the debate.

Mortem Stores is an installation by the designer Ian Walden that explores the assisted suicide debate, and saw its debut at the conference. Using discursive design theories, provocation and (very) dark humour as a guide, the installation is a fictional shop where people can buy products to help them take their own life. It includes over 100 unique artefacts all of which have been designed and copywritten by Ian, with a tongue-in-cheek tone and retro-futurist finish.

There’s a few important things to note before going any further. Firstly, Ian is well aware of the sensitivity of the issue, and the possible controversy of exploring it through provocation and humour. Before setting foot in the installation, each person is given a breakdown of what it deals with, as well as a list of lengthy support information to access if needed. Secondly, Ian is coming at this from a death-positive and pro-assisted suicide perspective, but, importantly, for Old Age Rational Suicide (OARS) – those who are 65 and over, and feel ready to die. This stance developed after a very personal experience – the death of Ian’s mother, who experienced a slow and “distressing” death after having a debilitating stroke in 2009.

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Copyright © Museum Tot Zover

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Mortem Stores (Copyright © Ian Walden)

“As a designer, I hate the term problem-solvers – we’re problem-finders.”

Nicola Salkeld
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Cyanobacteria (Copyright © Tom Hubmann)

But the installation is more more layered than a simple debate of ‘pro’ or ‘anti’. It uses the products, alongside stories of fictional individuals in a short film – as a vehicle to explore not only assisted dying, but the potential pitfalls that could exist if it were to be legalised in the UK today, in the society we currently live in. “The branding of Mortem Stores was influenced by neoliberalism and the commodification of everything, including our healthcare system,” says Ian. When discussing why Nicola and Ashley chose to focus on the topic of death, Nicola pertinently said that “as a designer, I hate the term problem-solvers – we’re problem-finders”, and this is an ethos that resonates in Mortem Stores. Ian isn’t only looking to “solve” the issue of assisted suicide, but predict the potential dangers that might come with it, too.

Throughout the conference – as is throughout much of Nicola and Ashley’s work – discussion looked at how design could help (and is helping) to package the topic of death to younger generations, those who don’t necessarily relate to aesthetics prevalent today. Brand aesthetics are still widely unchanged from decades ago, but for boundary-pushing projects like the Lovers rebrand of Poppy’s or Anna Charity’s branding for Farewill, for example. Vikki says that we’re still relying on the Victorian aesthetics, especially in the funeral industry: “because the Victorians made death visual,” Nicola says. “Gothic type, black dress, the coding, the meaning of flowers and different colours [...] they were the master designers of the visual language of death.”

Two speakers at the conference showed how younger generations are taking death visuals into their own hands, especially through the online world. Raquel Lucas’ talk focused on how the online sphere has provided a new space for mourning, bringing a whole new realm of aesthetics with it, like ‘traumacore’. Popularised in the mid-2010s on Tumblr, traumacore is characterised by cutesy imagery and characters (like Hello Kitty) paired with dark commentary, creating a sense of deadbeat irony. It’s largely seen as a means for young people to work through complex issues like mental health, outside of lacking support in wider society.

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Copyright © Moth

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Copyright © Museum Tot Zover

“Gothic type, black dress, the coding, the meaning of flowers and different colours... [Victorians] were the master designers of the visual language of death.”

Nicola Salkeld
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Mortem Stores (Copyright © Ian Walden)

Meanwhile, Xin Pang’s talk explored the visual language of grief in Japanese pop culture. Xin’s thesis suggests that in a rapidly globalising world, young people in Japan are experiencing higher levels of anxiety, causing them to ‘grieve’ the loss of their childhoods. This has resulted in fashion trends like ‘Gothic Lolita’ – a pastiche of Victorian children’s dress, characterised by dark colours and ruffles with cutesy and emo twists, as well as the rise of terms like Menhera (a slang term that references a person with mental health issues), and the popularity of artists like Avogado, an illustrator blending anime characters and scenes with dark depictions of murder, self harm and gore.

Raquel and Xin argued that even if the mainstream visual representations of death have stagnated, young people have found ways to depict it from their own unique viewpoint – with technology lending a helping hand. Other projects of note in this space include Donate Yourself by Dr Stacey Pistsillides’ and design collective Body>Data>Space, an augmented reality experience presenting stories and perspectives on what it means to donate organs; and the NHS and Snapchat’s collaborative filter that helped users to scan their bodies and find out more about their organs, raising awareness of the importance of donation.

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Copyright © Moth

Lastly, illustration lecturer Tom Hubmann offered an altogether different perspective on death in his talk, looking at how he uses illustration as a tool to investigate a post-anthropocenic (post-human) world. In his speculative project, humans, as well as all carbon-based life, have died out due to the collapse of our ecosystem. Instead, Tom’s illustrations show that cyanobacteria – morphic figures that exist off electricity and look more similar to plants and bacteria than humans – have taken over our planet. In a particularly resonant point, Tom said that he asked his partner’s father, a philosopher, why people aren’t talking about the death of humanity, to which he replied – “because they can’t relate to it”. What Tom’s illustrations do is bring this post-human existence to life, providing a springboard for discussion, and hopefully, action.

When it comes to death, design’s role is an important one. It can help us to visualise things we don’t yet have the mechanisms to face, making topics society has deemed too difficult to talk about easier to tackle and digest. But it can also be provocative, producing visual worlds that push us to question convention: like why we won’t have serious conversations about people’s right to take their own lives, or why we refuse to take the death of our environment more seriously. But, if there was one overarching thing to be taken from the conference, it was that confronting death doesn’t have to be depressing, dreary or solemn. In fact, sitting with mortality, pulling apart how society deals with it, and forming our own unique attachment to it, can in fact help us to live our lives more fully.

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Copyright © Moth

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Further Info

mortemstores.online/support – a list of resources for support with any of the issues raised in this feature.

www.moth.org.uk

About the Author

Olivia Hingley

Olivia (she/her) is associate editor of the website, working across editorial projects and features as well as Nicer Tuesdays events. She joined the It’s Nice That team in 2021. Feel free to get in touch with any stories, ideas or pitches.

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