JULIA ECHEVARRIA

My interest in exploring mortality as a subject for design is the catalytic outcome of experiencing the year of my mother’s tumultuous death simultaneously to the 2016 U.S. presidential race. I saw unmistakable but hard-to-describe parallels between my stepdad’s abusive responses to the progression of my mom’s dementia and the values espoused by then-candidate, now-president Trump. In January 2017, I first learned about Terror Management Theory or TMT and discovered the theoretical language to explain these parallels. 

TMT posits that “our shared cultural worldviews...give us a sense of meaning, an account for the origin of the universe...and the promise of immortality” (Solomon, Greenberg, Pyszczynski, 2015, p 8). These worldviews “...protect us from the terror that the knowledge of...death might otherwise arouse. When confronted with reminders of death, we react by criticizing and punishing those who oppose or violate our beliefs, and praising and rewarding those who support or uphold our beliefs” (Solomon et al, 2015, p 14). In other words, when the system that allows us to cope with our terror by keeping it repressed encounters a conflict, it “self-corrects” by telling us to double-down on our worldviews: this is one origin of oppressive, hateful, and violent behaviors (Solomon et al, 2015, p 137). 

Using this lens as a graduate design student, my work probes how mortality is situated in American culture through multimedia design inquiries, and has informed observations that now direct my thesis work: 

1. Death-denial is an affordance of privilege. Privilege means access to life-extending resources. Therefore, the folks in the U.S. who are best equipped to deny death are also those with the greatest opportunity to grow old. Two problems emerge from this: 

   1. In the absence of a societal system that can or will correct social inequity, we need to redefine the word “genocide” to include indirect, subconscious, and/or market-driven behaviors that build on a paradigm of hierarchical life valuation.

   2. There is an unprecedented, burgeoning population of people living into decrepitude (Gawande, 2017, p 32). 

2. Design overwhelmingly is encoded with death-denying values (see Appendix A). 

I intervene by designing toward good deaths, in which the dying person in pain can reclaim some control over their suffering and the manner of their death. I investigate how archival interfaces can be designed to support the human* thought exercises necessary to make end-of-life decisions, especially with respect to self-directed death**. (see Appendix B). I approach this through a series of UX experiments that imagine a digital archive about, for, and by its user. The resulting tool creates a space external to the user's mind for self-conversation—an indeterminate sandbox for meditation on life-valuation in response to both tangible and ineffable autobiographical artifacts.

In this critical design thesis I will argue that how we culturally relate to mortality has a direct influence on how we die—with potentially far-reaching sociological effects, and that designers can intervene by offering alternatives to culturally dominant narratives that shirk mortality and spotlight longevity. My arguments are intellectually rooted in TMT and demonstrate the value of applying this framework to critical theory and design practices.