Post-death service to keep and share cultural legacy of non-religious population
Overview
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Team Members
Mengru Zheng
Shu-Hsien Tan
Guanjie Ding
Jianhao Tan
My Contribution
Above all, my self-learning skill made me acquire various user research methods before this course, which inspired lots of research possibility in our group discussion. Then, I was skillful at video making in this group. Because the final proposal was presented via video, I was vigorous on storyboard planning, illustrating visual resources and was the main video maker.
Problem Statement
A phenomenon of increased life spans paired with decreased birth rates has found in developed countries including Australia. Due to the accentuating wave of death, the rituals, artefacts and meaning once found in religion no longer provide meaning. The non-religious population in Australia is visibly increasing. Simultaneously, dissatisfaction with legacy service providers has converged to propose alternative ways of dealing with death. As such, non-religious society is seeking contemporary strategies for dealing with death. In this case, our goal is to redesign death movement by generating value through service innovation and improving human experiences.
​Introduction
This is a group project in one of my electives, Service Design. Our task was to propose the design of new post-death service using human-centric methods and research-led processes.
Research
The human-centric research started with surveys separately. Then, each of us organised more than 5 face-to-face interviews to collect opinions about post-death and share our insights with each other across groups.
With the collected data, insights are categorised for better understanding and design directions. The insights include:
1. Tangible things trigger intangible feelings.
2. “Secular” people have beliefs and values too.
3. Keep it simple.
4. Authenticity in Death is individual not collective
5. Lack of awareness of non-traditional death services
6. I’m no burden (financial and emotional)
7. Reverse loss
8. No tech driven death rituals
9. Redesigning death means shaping culture and forging meaning
10. Death is a celebration of live; an inspiration to live well
11. The return of Paganism and Pantheism
12. Altruism is the new black
Opportunity Finding
In this stage we firstly mapped potential possibilities based on user journey. Then, we found that the impact of “Death” is circular in terms of culture. The findings inspired that the “Death” is not only represent the end of life but also a sign of new life; it passes the impact from the past to the future. A simple statement is constructed from the inspiration: “Everyone is living under the shadow of the past.”
The design question emphasises on the ways death reshaping the culture and builds the legacy for the 31.5% of non-religious population. With the existing religious artefacts and rituals as the immense impact to the world, what could possibly be the impact from the non-religious population passing to the future? Hence, the research then proceeds with case studies by analysing the legacy and culture of the three main religions in Australia. By comparing the Australian’s three major faiths, the collected data allows recognition on the similarities and motives amongst them. Subsequently, the religions’ beliefs, artefacts, rituals, organisations and histories have selected as the group of interests to explore on design intervention of post-death service.
The insights that gained from earlier stage and the case studies are providing inspirations for design interventions. With the selected design opportunities, the next approach is to identify the potential tangible and intangible types of design intervention that working as a post-death system that caters for the target group.
Final Proposal
“Timeless Library” is a service system that helps non-religious people to document their philosophy and skills, and then keep their legacy once they died both in digital and physical world.
As cultural input, it provides consultation and association service for people who want to document their legacy when they are alive. Once they died, it keeps non-religious people’s legacy in both digital and physical storage. To keep the impact going on, the social heritage gallery includes online platform for information sharing and activities in open space located at multiple cities.
