Event overview
How do new aesthetics challenge our preconceptions of death and dying? What do the dead mean to us in today's society? And how do new technologies impact our relationship to death?
This panel will discuss these questions from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives considering the contemporary need for more creative approaches to death and dying. Dying is one of the most personal experiences we will have in our lives and yet there are still norms for what bereavement and funerals should look and feel like. The funeral industry is adapting to the contemporary need for more individualised rituals and people’s desire to use funerals as a creative opportunity to embody the dead in our lives. In addition to this, the hospice movement is focusing on developing new approaches to holistic care and the design industry is responding to these changes by designing with users and service providers. How death may be designed is of specific interest for our speakers.
Speakers
Ivor Williams is a designer who specialises in death and dying, through his work as Senior Design Associate at the Helix Centre and his research and consultancy group Being and Dying . He explores the use of technology-for-good as co-founder of the design company, Humane Engineering. Their first product, Cove, is a music-maker designed to support grieving adolescents.
Louise Winter is a writer and the founder of Poetic Endings - a modern funeral service offering ceremonies of style, substance, relevance and meaning. She's also the editor of the Good Funeral Guide the only independent resource that exists to help the public get the funeral they want.
Dr. John Troyer is the Director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath. His interdisciplinary research focuses on contemporary memorialization practices, concepts of spatial historiography, and the dead body’s relationship with technology. He is a co-founder of the Death Reference Desk website , the Future Cemetery Project and a frequent commentator for the BBC.
Dr Ros Taylor is Clinical Director at Hospice UK. She combines her role at the charity with her work as a palliative doctor at the Royal Marsden Hospital. Ros joined Hospice UK as a director in October 2014. Prior to that she was the Director of the Hospice of St Francis in Berkhamsted. She has a special interest in medical education, medical humanities, ‘whole person care’ and has lectured widely, both nationally and internationally.
Chair
Stacey Pitsillides is a Lecturer at the Creative Professions and Digital Arts Department, University of Greenwich and Design PhD at Goldsmiths. Her research considers how technology and design shift our understanding of death and bereavement. She has curated events for public engagement that question legacy and aesthetics. She is on the committee for the Death Online Research Symposium and has facilitated unconferences discussing issues of death and digitality.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 15 Mar 2017 | 6:00pm - 9:00pm |
Accessibility
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