SingYu Lam
Frame
How can we enable secular young adults to grow spiritually through engaging in a regular habit of death reflection at home?
When was the last time you thought about death? In recent years, a growing body of anecdotal and scholarly research has brought attention to the positive effects death cognition can bring to your personal and professional life. Death has the potential to be a clarifying force in our lives like nothing else.
Frame is a physical and digital experience that provides a secular framework through which users can reflect on death in a positive and constructive way. It achieves this through encouraging regular meditation on aspects of death reflection, encouraging actionable change tailored to the user, and a tangible object that helps focus the user’s attention. Let’s be part of the generation that changes how we think about death.
Insight
Thinking about death can and should be a part of living. While it is easy to say thinking about death is an important thing, very few of us are able to say we think about it meaningfully on a day-to-day basis. Preliminary surveys reveal that while this may be the case, becoming more familiar with death make us less afraid of it, and that 90%of people are open to the idea of thinking about death to change how they live.
Research backs up these observations. Not only is death reflection, and its 5 constituent factors correlated with greater life satisfaction, but the researchers also found increases in both workplace performance and prosocial behaviour.
Idea
Working together with book authors, palliative care physicians, and hospice nurses over the course of several months, I designed Frame, a solution that combines both physical and digital elements to encourage death reflection in the home. Reflection is carried out through guided meditation sessions provided with the app. The counting pebble is used to progress through the session and provide tactile sensations to focus on.
User testing and workshops revealed that users preferred a stationary, at-home experience over something more portable and mobile, and always positively praised the incorporation of physical interactions as part of the experience.
Impact
Death is one of the most poorly kept secrets,with books, speakers, and even death cafes that all touch upon the subject. And yet, it can be one of the hardest things to think about and talk about with others.Frame tackles this societal taboo directly on a personal level, and indirectly through encouraging social connection and word of mouth.
Right now in the midst of the global pandemic, it seems as though we have all been brought closer to death, regardless of how old we are or where we are in the world. This project has the potential to provide a frame work through which we can calibrate ourselves and those around us to the brevity of life and how to live more fully with the time we have left.
