Matter of Grief: Design research on relational death-care and funerary practices [Cosmology of Death]

The Matter of Grief design-research project is grounded within the interaction design field and has been created through a situated understanding of knowledge — recognising that our perspectives are inherently shaped by specific cultural, geographical, and temporal conditions. The research frames funerals and burial practices as sites through which relationships between beings, environments, institutional systems, and culture are mediated. Positioned within the Baltic region, the research engages with local contexts while remaining attentive to the ways those contexts are influenced by broader global discourses and shifting societal values.
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The project holds two motivating concerns alongside one another: the cultural and relational dimensions of grief — vernacular Baltic ritual, somatic and collective experiences of bereavement, the spaces and vocabularies through which grief is held — and the environmental responsibility and sustainability dimensions of decision-making within the contemporary landscape of death-care. Whilst the work draws on academic and philosophical scholarship across multiple disciplines, the research has been fuelled by care for the individual and collective experiences of loss and grief. In this research, grief is recognised as an intangible dimension shaped by the conditions and narrative of the death experience. The subjective nature of the emotional and bodily response of grief makes the study of death a sensitive and vulnerable terrain; the rarity of prior design-research in this field deepens that sensitivity.
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The degree project addresses three audiences who share an underlying need to contextualise death and grief: pre-planners contextualising their own death, individuals in active grief, and those caring for someone in grief. The design proposition that emerges is Cosmology of Death, a virtual platform whose distinctive affordance is a vocabulary beyond spoken or written word — made available through spatial composition, a body that forms alongside the visitor, image, and the curated juxtaposition of elements — products, services, practices, and creative works mapped across the death-care landscape.

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