Augmento Mori:

Designing life into death

Exploring design interventions that rebalance the place of death and dying in modern society.

Status: Active primary design implementation.

Are you, or is someone you love. a person with life-limiting illness in palliative care who wants to share your story? Are you a member of a medical, spiritual or death support care network?

Are you curious to explore your own views on death and dying? Take a brief survey here

What does it mean to die well in a world obsessed with living forever?

In the modern Western world, death is expensive, over-medicalized, traumatic and under-discussed. It makes sense- thinking about our own death or that of our loved ones isn’t easy to do. It’s a hard topic to broach. And our technology is advancing so fast that many believe we will soon live in an age of undying.

Death is normally a part of any natural life cycle but for us, it’s quite clearly disconnected. On top of that, nearly all of us want to die at home, but most of us die in institutions like hospitals and ICUs meant to keep us alive at all costs. These places are designed to preserve Life, not let it go.

What does it mean to die naturally in the digital age of the eternal and undying? Where do we find meaning and purpose from life if death is taken out of the human loop?

The way that we die, is changing. The modern tech of our world have made death and dying hard and brutal for some, and cold, medical and foreign for others. What does the way that we die say about the way we live?

Dr. Kathryn Mannix explains the very simple, ordinary, process of dying. It’s quite boring, actually, and mostly looks nothing like it does in the movies.

“Our tech is advancing so much that many of us assume that soon, dying will be optional. Or at the very least least, we will live for much healthier for much longer than we currently do. But that just isn’t the case for much of the world and most every other living thing found in nature. ”
— Augmento Mori

Do we really have to die?

Not everyone thinks so. Are they right? Is dying immoral or are we simply running from the inevitable?

What does it mean to die in the age of eternal youth?

According to some people, death is a plague that can and will be eradicated. What happens to our sense of order, and our understanding of life— without death?

Is dying a set of factors in our control? If so, does that mean that dying is an act of violence, destruction and self harm?

But for nearly 70 percent of people who took this poll, living forever just is not in the cards for humanity. And no matter what happens in the future, most of us will die in the coming decades.