Bury Me In My Bookcase
Death is finding new life in innovations that used to be a bit taboo. While it’s the season of morbid curiosity, a growing openness to thinking about the end of our lives is translating into innovative designs when it comes to death.
Body composting as the new green alternative to death may mean Grandma comes back as a flower bed. But as we eschew the new in favor of the old and re-loved, death is another avenue of a deeper commitment to sustainable living. Now, you can also live with what takes you underground later, with a wooden bookcase that can morph into a coffin. British designer William Warren created the earth-friendly Shelves of Life to look at ways we can “promote sentimentality in objects.”
And in Korea, young people can participate in weekend retreats to experience the afterlife and plan for it, by testing out coffin sizes and even lying in them in silence for ten minutes. These mock funerals are a newer way to honor the life you do have. And if you want to outsource your immortality plans, digital death curators may soon decide, according to your will, who gets access to your social footprints, dm’s and photo libraries post-mortem. Our faces and voices may live long beyond our physical bodies with the rise of deep fakes. The parts of us we may take for granted, from our likeness to the sound of our voices, are also human data that may come back to haunt us in completely different forms.
Of course, we could be dead by then.
Anna is the Editorial Director at sparks & honey and author of sparks & honey’s cultural intelligence reports. She eats blueberries at 5pm every day, and when she's not writing, Anna is running across bridges in NYC, taking photographs along the way.