P A S S A G E.
Rethinking death and dying experience by
reimagining hospice and palliative care industry
Passage began by acknowledging the deeply fragmented death experience in our contemporary society. Through a user-centered design approach, Passage fosters acceptance and awareness for death and dying with an objective to assist people by giving permission to openly discuss their finite lives. Passage acts as an active information hub by creating hospice showrooms at various locations across the country where multiple design configurations tailored for different patient needs are exhibited, allowing patients, caregivers, and hospices to explore and curate a space best-suited for what they desire.
"As a species we have been confronted with our own mortality and connectivity in a way not seen since the early 20th century due to the current Pandemic we find ourselves in. We have also been made painfully aware of the lack of oversight, continuity of care and deterioration of the patient and caregiver experience as our hospitals are overwhelmed and front-line caregivers driven to exhaustion. But the endemic issues in healthcare were present before the pandemic, the virus only made them more pronounced. As a result, the current reckoning in the healthcare system and patient experience provides a unique opportunity to re-examine the palliative care and death experience, and design the futures we want to participate in.
The last phase of life has been devalued and ignored culturally in recent generations, and even commodified to the extent that any emotional or individualistic needs of the patient and family are absent, even though this is something we will all collectively experience, both as caregivers and patients. Hospice and Palliative care are taboo subjects in certain cultures, while they are revered and celebrated as rituals and rites of passage in others. This studio will endeavor to examine and better understand our collective perceptions of death and comfort and how this is expressed in the spaces and objects we engage in during this time in our own life and the lives of our loved ones.
Design has the power to change policy and call attention to injustice, oversight and societal blind spots. Through designing space, objects and brand identities we will be rethinking the Hospice and Palliative care model and expanding what this industry is and can become."
A. Final presentation board:
B. Proposed Website: https://passage.myportfolio.com/
C. Branding:
(a) Brand book:
(b) e:lapse: designing object to facilitate the experience of death and dying
Engaging with the ideas of hospice and death at an object scale - passage of time experienced through mediums of light and water, designed as a tool to facilitate experience of death and dying: 'e:lapse' allows one to understand how natural light interacts with water, making each moment of interaction to be unique and special, depending on the amount of water in the vessel as well as the intensity of light depending on time of the day. Through transparency and reflectivity of its material, e:lapse would create different reflection and abstraction of light, changing the overall spatial atmosphere.
2021
