January 21, 2021

Dying

(Living)

“Grief is not a feeling; it’s a skill” Stephen Jenkinson

Tim Wilson’s achingly beautiful film Griefwalker is a close study of the lifeways of Stephen Jenkinson, wise guide to families and individuals navigating the complicated world of hospice and palliative care. A woodsman and master craftsman who makes by hand everything that he needs for his own survival, Jenkinson has intentionally chosen a lifestyle that removes all the buffers between his survival needs and the impact of those needs on his environment — an expression of what he calls “the mandatory arts of living deeply and dying well.” Approaching death through a cultural rather than a psychological or religious lens, he practices premodern folkways as an embodied expression that our societal obsession - even addiction - to the values of competence and autonomy belie a deep collective death phobia. Jenkinson is critical of so-called “quality of life” criteria that drive the “patient centered care” orientation of the palliative care industry because in its consumerist orientation it seeks above all to preserve patient choice, autonomy, and competence such that our interdependent tends to be devalued. Jenkinson asks, in our emphasis on autonomy do we not deprive our elders of the opportunity to be incompetent? To be in need of help? To relax, and surrender into their waning power over their own bodies and minds? Elderhood is a significant passage of life. For those who are fortunate enough to live to this phase, the degrees of rawness possible are titrated by the healthcare system. The Griefwalker teaches us that patient centered care and patient centered design, in order to live up to these names, will widen the range of metrics to embrace rather than deny mortality. Competency and autonomy are no match for grief. Too fierce to be managed, it rather is yielded to and encountered on its own terms and in its own timing.

Humans are unique among animals for our full awareness of the inevitability of death. Although we may never look at it directly, we are as much in the process of dying as we are in living. As individuals, coming-of-age means developing a working relationship with our mortality. We may find ourselves thoroughly embedded in our families and our careers, feeling mostly invincible apart from the times when death interrupts our lives like a commercial announcement aimed at someone else. Death is the ultimate authentic act. We can’t opt out. No one can do it for us. It’s our’s to do in and as ourself. If we never face and name our terror of death, this denial warps and distorts the ways we live. Embracing death as direct experience supports our vitality. We may find that we have less need for the pacifiers and surrogate objects of desire and more need for depth of experience. Revealing the co-presence of death within life, the co — presence of insecurity within security, the co– presence of helplessness within control, new social structures such as the meet-up Death Café, are emerging based on the premise that only by embracing the inevitability of our death can we fully embrace life unguardedly and joyfully. <Deepening - Shallowing>

The conventional designed world, in its fixation on youth and equation of youth with beauty, reflects our collective denial of death. The Victorian era, in its horror of sex and death, set the early industrial stage for this pattern of aversion and substitution of consumable surrogates. In the early adulthood of the designing professions, we see that our work in the world has been to open access to certain kinds of human experiences while simultaneously obscuring other kinds of experiences. Based on demographics and psychographics, the mass marketing of design both reveals and conceals instinctual and egoic attractions and aversions. Any designer knows that conventional design has been occupied with attractive consumer offerings promising safety, power, love, status, control, youth and sex appeal. What’s not so obvious is that in so doing, design has been equally occupied with proffering consumer choices to help us avoid insecurity, powerlessness, isolation, helplessness, and death. In fact we might say that consumer products serve as decoys or distractions from experiences that we don’t want to have. Death epitomizes the experience we don’t wish to have — all of our other aversions being only glimpses. This topic is explored in detail in Ken Wilber’s The Atman Project - a worthy read for professional designers.

As professional design practice comes of age it finds itself less interested in appearances and more drawn to experiences; keen to develop designed experiences for living beings rather than consumers; invested in designing opportunities to embrace the paradoxical and precarious evanescence of being alive including decline and decay. Conscious designing demands that we develop the capacities to embody the needs of our clients, particularly at thresholds such as birth, adolescence, childbearing, meno-, andro-pause, elderhood and death. Transformative changes are taking place in the healthcare and palliative care fields and these trends are fortuitous for conscious designers seeking to make a difference in end-of-life quality. Patient centered designing of the future will engage more deeply with the human condition and rather than airbrushing death with flesh-colored wall treatments and soft lighting, will innovate around environments and care structures to assist individuals in facing death as a natural, communal, and sacred passage. The aging of the baby boom generation is an unprecedented social, technological, economic, and cultural event that will bring opportunities to design more good, true, and beautiful structures for dying and death. Just as they set a different tone for youth and midlife, the baby boom generation will demand more humane, transparent, and connected ways of aging. Living and dying in dignity and in community is a value that will reshape the entire hospice space. <Revealing - Concealing>

Although design has been instrumental in the promotion of trendy and superficial commodities, design innovation around dying has the potential to help us to become more fully human. Designers have a transformational role to play in choreographing and prototyping the delivery of these new choice architectures (Thaler, Sunstein). Designers who feel called can serve the rewarding project of tailoring designed artifacts and environments to the liminal and precious context of death and dying. A remarkable example is the Infinity Burial Project, currently in development by Jae Rhim Lee and Mike Ma of Coeio. The Infinity Burial Suit, originally developed at MIT, is embroidered with threads infused with mushroom spores. After burial, a process of “decompiculture” begins as the mushroom spores metabolize body toxins into compounds that can be safely absorbed by the earth. This innovative working design prototype embodies the spirit of conscious designing by exploring viable alternatives to toxic conventional funerary practices, while offering people more real and coherent end-of-life choices.

When conventional consumer goods fail to meet us at our mortal depth, consciously or unconsciously we register this inauthenticity as a feeling of disquiet or unsafety. Consciously designed artifacts can open engagements with the delights and perils of our human experience. If we allow ourselves to encounter our experiences without buffers, the precarity of our world drops us into the <$n>stark beauty of our mortal life. We humans need intimacy and depth of engagement equal to the exquisite frailty of our contemporary human experience. Because conscious designing enacts human values in and through our bodies, conscious designing is a medium for living-dying. Conscious designing reveals possibilities for naked participation with reality no matter how difficult or how strange. If we are willing, we can taste our heartfelt need to die while still alive as a raw vitality. In contrast, living in the inauthentic shallows will seem a form of premature death before death. Embrace of crisis and discomfort creates access points that allow us to experience the fullness of life — ecstatic and grieving, celebratory and sober, abject and delectable. Designing, understood as a life project, is a process of conscious living-dying. Our living-dying-ness is a companion that keeps us awake to possibility while lending meaning to our endeavors.

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