DESIGN POSSIBLE STUDY 1: LIVING AND DYING (生與死): 

Promoting design in response to everyday life, the first Design Possible Study curated by HKDI DESIS Lab in collaboration with William Outcast (陳偉霖), design activist of death (設計.死) who’s born with skin cancer and organised the first living funeral in Hong Kong, “Design. Living & Dying” touches on the most taboo subject in our lives: dying, funeral and burial (生死殯葬). Afterlife is an issue concerned by many elders. They are not afraid of talking about death but instead they are willing to plan their death rituals, which make them feel completing a full circle of life. New technologies have been developed and introduced to the funeral care industries. Even though, these technologies have a strong agenda of ecological sustainability but many of these new ideas are unacceptable since they are challenging the traditional death ritual and belief.

 

The aim of this Study is to use design to show new possibilities to the practices of death rituals and explore new suggestions to ‘death’ education. These suggestions attempt to create sustainable solutions that are culturally acceptable. In collaboration with SAGE (仁智國際集團有限公司), a funeral care service company in Hong Kong and China and its charity arm (仁智尊嚴會), the project’s first public programme will be an exhibition launch in late October that focuses on different design areas between life and death. It will feature creative works by over 300 students from 9 HKDI/THEi/ IVE Foundation Diploma departments in collaboration with more than 100 elders in Hong Kong, which intend to show new ways of understanding and responding to life and death. Process of the 8-week cross-disciplinary and co-design project curated by the HKDI DESIS Lab and William Outcast will also be part of the exhibition with interactive installations for public to enquire the issue of death: (擁抱死亡,尊重生命).