Design for Death Competition Unveils How We Remember the Dead

SINGAPORE, June 12 (Bernama) -- If over 700 designers worldwide, including Singapore, have their way, funerals of the future will look and feel very different. Imagine capturing Grandma’s familiar scent for eternity. A micro airship designed to transform people into gentle rain after they die. Or going off in a 'mushroom suit' – where the body is biodegraded naturally by mushrooms. These are just a few of the many ideas revealed by results of the Design for Death competition aimed to re-imagine deathcare. "Death is central to human existence but we live in a culture estranged from it," said Lee Poh Wah, chief executive officer of Lien Foundation, a Singapore philanthropic house noted for its efforts in advancing care for the dying. "The competition challenges designers to develop new products and experiences that create new meaning, interactions and conversations about death. The entries received range from the elegant and sublime to the thought-provoking and avant-garde. "They give death a modern twist and makeover, reducing the fear factor," he said at a press briefing held here Tuesday. A heightened sense of end-of-life matters was evident from the submitted entries, as designers made sensitive interpretations of life and death, grief, relationships and memories - intertwined with the thoughtful use of function, style, aesthetics and environmental sustainability. The winner of the 'Eco/Green Deathcare' category is France's Pierre Rivière and Enzo Pascual, with his entry called "Emergence", where a cemetery is envisaged to be a reservoir of life. The cemetary is made of biological concrete to absorb carbon dioxide and give electricity, and where the departed rest in highly biodegradable urns or coffins that can eventually revitalise the earth through their remains. Under the 'Wrappings of Mortality' category, winners Asta Sadauskaite and Loucas Papantoniou from Lithuania and Greece impressed the jury with the simple but powerful "Family Tree" - a cluster of honeycomb-shaped urn vaults with OLED (organic light-emitting diode) covers that serve as a final resting place for families. Founder of ACM Foundation, Ang Ziqian, shared what the competition aims to do as part of the Foundation’s mission to uplift the deathcare sector. "Through the innovations that have emerged from the competition, we hope to refresh and change current mindsets in the deathcare industry," he said. He said there are new areas of possibilities to be explored, creative concepts and solutions to be reviewed as deathcare practitioners seek to make caring for the dead and their families a profession well regarded by all. Ang also announced the competition’s second call for entry to redesign deathcare spaces such as columbariums, funeral or memorial halls and places of remembrances. All Design for Death winners will go to Austin, Texas and have their work showcased at the annual 2013 NFDA International Convention & Expo from Oct 20 to 23, the pinnacle event for the deathcare industry that draws thousands of participants from all over the world each year. Details of this second and final phase of Design for Death will be on www.designboom.com, the competition’s administrator. On the successful first phase of the competition, NFDA’s chief executive officer Christine Pepper said: "The many entries we received from designers around the world show that innovation in deathcare doesn’t have to come from funeral directors." "The ideas and innovations presented by the designers bring fresh perspectives to our profession and challenge funeral directors to think about the services and products they offer to families in new ways." Design for Death is the first of three joint initiatives between Lien Foundation and ACM Foundation that seek to bring end-of-life matters and deathcare to the forefront of public awareness and appreciation. In the pipeline are plans to redesign a hospice and launch a community arts engagement programme in a Singapore hospital. --BERNAMA