Designing with death in mind, or The fiction of use & efficacy in UX

Sit next to me for a moment, won’t you? I have the pleasure of occupying the Chicago O’Hare Int’l Airport. I am waiting for my Check-In to open up, Norwegian Airlines. I am rather excited to represent my team at a design conference in Oslo. To me, this all sounds fantastic and simultaneously mundane, given the, dare I say, provocative title of this article. The reason being, our presentation is over a concept design, explicitly dealing with death.

IMPORTANT: What you are about to read is not about our design case, per se, rather, this is my attempt to explain the intentional head-space I tried to occupy in order to approach this inward-facing design. How does one pick up the brush to repaint death when one has never experienced it?

When writing this article, I had been rehearsing to present in front of an international audience, in Oslo. Everyone shuffling, mingling, overly-caffeinated, lethargically ready to critique and speculate along with presenters. I reflected upon the steps my team had taken to bring our design to life. During the 32 hours between Chicago and Oslo, I brought my attention back to two essays which provided the main content theory, a fancy phrase to claim a framework of concept relationship and inspiration.

Please join me, then, as I explore how one particular essay landscaped the theoretical horizon in which death lay flat, seductive, and malleable. If interested, pick up Death and Philosophy, edited by Jeff Malpas and Robert C. Solomon, you will find many elements of intrigue, but you will also find the work I have been particularly drawn to:

“Death, The Bald Scenario,” by Betty S. Flowers

How to encounter, let alone design for, death.

Design makes it difficult to account for death. Often we evade, avoid, and work-around the topic of death, not simply in design, but in our collective cultural conscious. Its uncomfortable. Uneasy. We know it happens to everyone, but it won’t ever actually happen to us, will it? Until it does.

In “Death, The Bald Scenario,” author Betty S. Flowers begins with two quotes. The juxtaposition of their meaning will forever be ingrained in my mind. The first is by a near death survivor, describing his touch with the “otherside,” capturing an experience that motivated him towards a life that has a telos of learning, and that learning can continue past, or transcend, death. Here we see this survivor as someone who is inspired by a believed empirical account of their experience, who feels like the veil is lifted and seeks something to know what can be known.

However, this is not novel, nor, I would argue, makes for a very interesting or believable account. So allow me to offer the second quote, which directly proceeds this account.

“The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.” (by Wallace Stevens, reintroduced by Betty Flowers p. 50)

What the second quote offers is a slight undercut to the fantastic imagination of the first. It displaces the credibility, but not in a mean-spirited manner. It simply states that whatever learning — or point of contact the near-death survivor faced, is a fiction. We all live through fictions. Let me unpack this. It is not that we live through experiences we consider to be mythic or magical. It is that we navigate life by way of our own, subjective, ever-evolving narrative. Our fictions, our mediating life-tales, permit us to sense-make and anticipate, digest the present, and place ourselves in the happenings of all things. The strength of our fiction can often by gauged by the strength by which our belief promotes it.

As a designer, I find this to be incredibly powerful when articulated for oneself. Flowers introduces the idea of fictions, specifically as

“…a belief or a subject of belief whose truth is accepted uncritically” (p. 53).

In a sense, fictions are the invisible structures which shape our society, the things which some consider social norms. For instance, a fiction could be that we all agree that a green stoplight means “go” and red indicates for the driver to “stop.” There is no inherent axiom which denotes these signifiers to reciprocate our behaviors, yet our cultural genealogies (a la Foucault) have taught us to react to them accordingly.

She marries this observation of fiction alongside others, such as a religious myth (where what is true is handed down from an almighty power), or a hero myth (where the most virtuous, self-sacrificing, and epic individual is the best humans could be). These myths are long past, Flowers exhales. She argues that we live in the “economic myth.” That truth and what is good can be indicated by quantity and communicated through numbers and pictures. Let me unpack that a bit.

Economic Myth

She provides us with three ideals of this myth, the things that qualify what we believe to be good in modern life.

1. The medium of this myth is numbers and pictures. Language barriers are conquered through symbols and emotive photography. Numbers are impossible to ignore.
2. It works in a horizontal manner, not vertical. It is not strictly about what we are born into (although I would argue it has a strong part of it). It could be said that Flowers argues once life is created, it begins a collection. The quantity of achievements, and promotions of such, invariably determine how an individual evaluates his or her success.
3. Finally, it is ideal to grow. Those who are not climbing some sort of quantified ladder are those left in the dust.

(Paraphrased from page 54)

If true, what are the implications of the economic myth?

A generalized future; how this plays out in our life-composition.

1. We grow and we indicate how we grow. Say for instance, I am a carpenter. (It does not matter the particulars.) We learn to document, whether explicitly through curated photos, a journal, or implicitly, for example, my creations have been purchased and scattered around neighboring towns, thus my sense of recognition is fueled by others. Whatever the vehicle, this documentation allows us to discover our own subjective fame and recognition. We are enticed to grow more.
2. But what are we growing into? Are we growing into the expected form of self-satisfaction? Do we only understand how to evaluate our efficacy of attaining our telos (or purpose) by quantifying our efforts? It is very comfortable to feel reassured by those who buy our products or services in bulk, by those social media “likes”, etc. However, we are not necessarily evaluating our ability to come into being. We are not recognizing our subject wafting and wavering through the demands of life. If we were, we would be breaking through the edges of our fictions. We would be becoming. We would feel uncomfortable in realizing new ways to be human. (Inspired by “Death and Authenticity,” by Julian Young.)
3. Let us assume we are following the par. We are growing into the “Hegelian One” (ibid.), or growing towards the socio-heirarchical expectations of our local culture. We are not utilizing our understanding of our culture to form a new design language to challenge it, to break out, innovate, or even be brave enough to stay still.
4. So now, we move along through life as carpenters and as designers and as people who have other people who call us familial relations. What is ensuring that this way of being, our economic cultural myth, stays steady? We have death as preserving the value of a cultural myth, the measure by which we are fulfilled before the day we die. It is the bookend of a life spent. Even the idea of “spending life” is only appropriate in the context of the economic cultural myth. We obey the fiction that we have a limited amount of time, to meet the “ever-shrinking” window of opportunity to make ourselves acknowledge what we have done as a success in life. The measurement is often akin to salary increase, owning real estate or collecting the greatest amount of “experiences” distributed on social media.
5. If we are living in accordance to this fiction of accumulating more of everything…And, if we acquire and thus we have done well in life. If, if if. Then we objectify what it means to live a good existence. At least, we can tell ourselves we can do so. We do not need to design for experience, after all. We design for delightful usability, i.e. efficacy and fluidity of capital for our clients. So are we designing for authentic experiences, ones which challenge and shake the ways in which humans, not users, see the world and come to know themselves? Not simply platforms by which users can propagate their “acquired” experiences in order to justify performing them?
6. This is rather cynical. So where do we as designers come in? And, wait a minute, wasn’t this essay on designing for death?

What does all of this have to do with experience design?

UX is not screens and pixels and poor desk posture, or the “solution” of stand-up desks and oxford shirts.

Again we evade, avoid, and work-around the topic of death, not simply in design, but in our collective cultural conscious. It is time we disrespect the certain, bold silence of death. It is time we pull the explanations for what is a good experience and good design into the framework of our cultural fictions. What might it look like if we designed intentionally to challenge the current ways we understand how “users” come to “utilize” a product or service? What if it was not user, rather users confronting their own fictions? What would come of us if we designed to reveal our own fears and dispell the certainties in life? What if we designed against the nullifying escape of the next delightful app?

Design should confront the wake death has upon our living fictions. It will not overcome it, but its encounter will certainly play effect on our present. We can use this backdrop to make malleable our cultural fictions, to uproot the ideas of how we validate and satisfy our needs to be recognized.

We currently design to see who has the most of the best experiences, made finite by the ledger of death. Why not play with the idea that the imminence of death can prompt and bring humans closer to the elements which we truly value, not simply keeping up appearances handed down to us by our current economic myth. The every-faithful inspiration, “What if you were to die tomorrow, how would you life differently?”

So let us be weary. If too obedient to the asks of our clients, we may design to keep the status quo, and this certainly is not inventing for the world that is to come, a world more human, made by our hands, through active discernment.

Below are some takeaway questions which may provoke interesting frameworks for your team’s next meeting. I hope you take into consideration the demands of efficacy and delightful design, and transform those into things that engage and complicate users’ relationships with their personal, unquestioned fictions.

1. How do we promote ingenuity? How do we create platforms to help other designers, users, and own our humanity flourish in unique, thrilling ways? Can we create experiences which provide humans the capability to break the mold of users, and become more human in a variety of manners, not simply those which are “delightful”?
2. Could we use a page from Flowers’ framework? Could we imagine a scenario in which we put into question what death means? Is it transformative? Is it something which will make us recreate our sense of self, challenge our ambitions, reshape the way we promote one another as authentic individuals? Can we pretend, as designers, through workshops, through team scrums, can we radically play? Can we give ourselves permission to recreate what it means to be alive, by recreating what it means to die? I think we can. That is, before you no longer have the means to have a voice about what is valuable.

Thank you for reading.

And thank you to Hope Kerkhoff, and Sheng Jiang, whom had equal if not more creation in “Black box, a concept design: grief work and the digitized self”.

If you would like to read the design case which was presented at the 10th NordiCHI conference, the DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3240167.3240280 , or send me an email at cjpfender@gmail.com

Skull illustration by author.

Cheers.