Design for Death.
Discursive products around remaines

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“Human behaviors are updating constantly, rituals vice versa are hard to change and evolve”

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pandora/designboom
diy-urn/designboom

A series of shortlisted projects I presented within a designboom International competition to catalyze the international creative and design community to re-think and re-imagine death-care for the future.


DIY-URN
Family, house, everyday life…just homemade.
Objects and artifacts created specifically for containing remains are invasive and often extraneous to the home environment. To make them warm and intimate we need to add a sense of “daily stuff”. Furthermore urns are always impersonal and they hardly move feelings and a proper memento of life. New technologies and digital fabrication could provide all the tools for the creation of a personal transitional object. Thousand of people have already uploaded on-line 3d scans of their head or body, doing that with kinect technology or simple mobile apps. In addition to it the desktop 3d printers sector is growing fast and the prices are totally affordable for everyone. In the next future probably, for different reasons - from security controls to gadgets creations, everyone will have his own face scanned and uploaded on line and everyone will be printing little plastic objects or at least will be using on-line 3d printing services. Within that scenario existing jars together with 3d printed caps can be the perfect familiar and romantic way to feel everyday the friendly presence of our loved, avoiding the austerity and coldness of the traditional urns.




Snow White
Can we turn the nightmare of the funerals into a romantic fairy tale?
Coffins are claustrophobic boxes that physically divide us from our beloved ones.
They lock up the bodies in a narrow space that we naturally connect with the bad feeling of being buried alive, imprisoned under the ground, doomed to suffer till an atrocious death. The actual coffins are responsible for that; they don’t represent adequate transitional objects, too close to the live world, too earthly. A more poetic and romantic solution is needed to place our loved on another level, still with us but not like us. Ice could give this sense of ethereal and delicate peace and providing a sort of celestial aspect. The fact itself that the ice-coffin will totally disappear symbolizes the full return to the ground and the final reunion with nature. Each coffin is casted in refrigerating rooms around the bodies filling molds with ionized water to maintain a high level of transparency of the ice. The ice-coffins, compared with traditional wooden ones, have a significant increase of weight and in some cases could be needed to move them on wheels. The base where the coffin would be placed on could be equipped with a cooling system to maintain the ice intact for the whole ceremony. Snow White and her crystal coffin has never frighten any kid and the way we should look at death care is exactly the way children’s’ pure and dreamy eyes see.



Pandora
Bring some fresh files on your grandma’s tomb.
Memory is the only language between us and our loved ones. As digital natives we are producing every single day enormous quantities of memories in the guise of photos, videos or twits. Together with flowers we could start sharing with defunct data and files. Pandora is a system to embed in tombstones and urns a hard drive in which pouring our lives. Holydays, Christmas, grandson’s wedding, commencements, everything is worthwhile to be shared. Through USB ports and a phone dock you can upload your files in this sort of Pandora’s box where everyone donate his own memories. The upload operation is made easier by a dedicated phone and computer app.