Abstract
Death and Anticipatory Grief remain culturally taboo, limiting opportunities for open dialogue and emotional preparedness. This paper explores how design can facilitate such conversations through play. Inner Play is a form of imaginative and introspective play that aids engagement with taboos in an empathic way, but lacks ways to understand and evaluate how to design for it. Employing a Research-through-Design approach, the papers presents a speculative design project that mediates communication between the bereaved and the deceased with a game kit resulting in a shared grief artefact. Ten participants in five workshops engaged in an iterative prototyping process, which resulted in the Inner Play framework. This framework consists of three key dimensions and an evaluation tool, Play Empathy Map, to guide design practitioners working with Taboo. The Framework contributes to ongoing efforts in play design to engage ethically with emotionally charged or tabooed aspects of human experience.
Keywords
Inner Play; Play Design; Death Studies; Anticipatory Grief
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1853
Citation
Melo, M., Kinch, S., Tibbles, A., and Køster, A. (2026) The Invisible Playground for Taboos: A framework for recognising and designing for Inner Play to engage with Death and Anticipatory Grief, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1853
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
The Invisible Playground for Taboos: A framework for recognising and designing for Inner Play to engage with Death and Anticipatory Grief
Death and Anticipatory Grief remain culturally taboo, limiting opportunities for open dialogue and emotional preparedness. This paper explores how design can facilitate such conversations through play. Inner Play is a form of imaginative and introspective play that aids engagement with taboos in an empathic way, but lacks ways to understand and evaluate how to design for it. Employing a Research-through-Design approach, the papers presents a speculative design project that mediates communication between the bereaved and the deceased with a game kit resulting in a shared grief artefact. Ten participants in five workshops engaged in an iterative prototyping process, which resulted in the Inner Play framework. This framework consists of three key dimensions and an evaluation tool, Play Empathy Map, to guide design practitioners working with Taboo. The Framework contributes to ongoing efforts in play design to engage ethically with emotionally charged or tabooed aspects of human experience.