“Going Home to Die” design installation

Design TO Festival, January 2020 

Our “Going Home to Die” design installation was created in collaboration with innovation designers Karen Oikonen and Kate Wilkes, former Research Coordinator Stephanie Saunders, as well as an advisory team comprised of patients and health care providers. The installation was part of the Dying. event series featured at the DesignTO festival from January 17 to January 26, 2020 at a community cultural hub. ‘Dying.exhibits’ was a group exhibit on end of life, inviting participants to think about their relationship with life and death as a process; encouraging difficult conversations through engaging in art, design works, and participatory experiences. In 2020 the Dying. event series by itself, attracted over 2000 attendees, featured 14 speakers along with 12 artists and designers across three exhibits and a symposium. Of those, 1,500 visitors came to the ‘Dying.exhibits’ and presumably saw our ‘Going Home to Die’ installation. In reviewing the completed wish and/or worry cards, which were the participatory part of our installation, 100 people interacted with the installation. 

Our installation conveyed a sense of the medicalization of home at the EOL, inviting attendees to reflect upon the universal experience of going home to die. By immersing attendees in the experience, it created an in-situ probe, invoking thoughtful contributions. This was done through the element of self-documentation, facilitated by the wish and/or worry cards, which were inspired by Japanese wooden blocks called Ema. Second, just as a probe intends to capture sentiments of people in their environments, the installation recreated the immersive end-of-life context using quotes from the research and artefacts of both home and medicine. Quotes featured in the piece included: ‘I imagine we’re going to be running almost on a 24h schedule’, ‘There is very little oversight of the process… it seems very rudderless’. The artefacts of medicine included a urine bag, pill bottle, mouth swabs, gloves, and a mask, contrasted against elements of home, such as a rug, front hall desk, mirror, and house keys. At the centre of the exhibit was a mirror with the words ‘Going Home to Die’ screened across, meant to invoke self-reflection in the attendee and encourage them to envision themselves as going home to die. 

For more information on this exhibit, please see our published article describing our process: View Article