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How might we envision radical societal norms and social dynamics in the context of sustainability and mortality through speculative design?
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We designed a community that embraces dying as the ultimate contribution to sustainability, and imagine objects, places, and artifacts this society would use.
Context
Speculative Design is a design approach that merges methodologies from futuring, forecasting, and design in order to manifest possible futures for human society and their artifacts.
Inspired by overpopulation theories and the fact that the most developed economies in the world have the lowest birth rates and drastically aging societies, we wondered what new forms of time and social interactions would emerge in a testbed community that radically objects medicine and idolizes death.
Solution
Facing the collapse of the planet’s ecosystem, the Non-Proliferators aim to achieve planetary sustainability in their enclave by naturally reducing the human population. They celebrate aging and dying as a contribution to their purpose and live according to time-cycles with alternating periods of procreation and procreation-bans.
The very few newborns are raised in a drastically aging population, in which family structures change and a new relationship with death is developed. Death is no taboo for the Non-Proliferators. Instead, it is a joyful perspective for them; a celebratory part of their lives considered a contribution to their purpose: increased human sustainability and population reduction.
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System Insight
Scientific evidence proves that the most developed countries in the world have the lowest birth rates and highest average age in society.
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Prototype Insight
This daring and provocative, yet aesthetically minimalistic manifestation of a radical society shakes viewer’s perspective on dying and death.
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Human Insight
Humans rarely consider their mortality when strategizing sustainability, since “defeating death” and “extending life expectancy” is the dominant logic driving modern societies.
Place for Dying
A speculative testing-site for new social concepts
2016-17
with Elena Habre, Valentina Branada Rojas
Client/Partner
Dunne & Raby Design Studio
Topics
Sustainability, Well-Being, End of Life, Commemoration, Ethnography
Approaches
Speculative Design, Design Fiction, Product Design, System Thinking
Output
Product Prototype, System Blueprint, 3D Mock-Up, Video, Exhibit