Abstract
Death remains one of the most enduring cultural taboos, often met with silence and avoidance across both Western and Eastern societies. Although design research has increasingly engaged with death through the lens of thanatosensitive design, it has largely focused on supporting the bereaved, leaving the perspectives and agency of the dying themselves under explored. This study explores the memorial diamond as a speculative medium for reimagining death rituals and the relationships between the deceased and the bereaved. Using a research through design approach, we engaged speculative design as both a future-oriented lens and a creative method to examine these phenomena. Memorial diamond jewellery served as a speculative probe within a participatory design process involving interviews and workshops with diverse stakeholders, through which four diegetic prototypes were developed and engaged with. These artefacts provoked reflection and dialogue around death, remembrance, and autonomy. The findings illustrate how speculative design can open up discursive spaces and mediate values surrounding death and mortality, enabling alternative and preferable imaginaries for culturally taboo practices and highlighting design’s potential to foster openness and agency in engagements with such themes.
Keywords
Death; Death Rituals; Thanatosensitivity; Speculative Design; Design for Taboo，Design Futuring
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.1125
Citation
Cheng, Y.,and Sun, J.(2025) Reimagining Death and Rituals through Design: Memorial Diamond Jewellery as a Speculative Probe, in Chang, C.-Y., and Hsu, Y. (eds.), IASDR 2025: Design Next, 02-05 December, Taiwan. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.1125
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Track 2 - Design Futuring
Reimagining Death and Rituals through Design: Memorial Diamond Jewellery as a Speculative Probe
Death remains one of the most enduring cultural taboos, often met with silence and avoidance across both Western and Eastern societies. Although design research has increasingly engaged with death through the lens of thanatosensitive design, it has largely focused on supporting the bereaved, leaving the perspectives and agency of the dying themselves under explored. This study explores the memorial diamond as a speculative medium for reimagining death rituals and the relationships between the deceased and the bereaved. Using a research through design approach, we engaged speculative design as both a future-oriented lens and a creative method to examine these phenomena. Memorial diamond jewellery served as a speculative probe within a participatory design process involving interviews and workshops with diverse stakeholders, through which four diegetic prototypes were developed and engaged with. These artefacts provoked reflection and dialogue around death, remembrance, and autonomy. The findings illustrate how speculative design can open up discursive spaces and mediate values surrounding death and mortality, enabling alternative and preferable imaginaries for culturally taboo practices and highlighting design’s potential to foster openness and agency in engagements with such themes.