One Good Death Tactile, Haptic, and Empathic Co-design for End-of-Life Experience

This chapter focuses on the use of tactile and haptic co-design media to engage participation of interdisciplinary groups and elicit empathy in complex problem spaces, such as end-of-life experience. At present the experience of people in aged care and in the community as they reach end of life can be inconsistent, clinically driven and not aligned with individual choices. In order to address this disjunct between the system and the individual the authors have developed a number of parallel approaches to engage haptic and tactile participation in the redesign of the death experience. The chapter reports on two such practices: The One Good Death Tactile Tools workshop and the One Good Death workshop-in-a-box activity. The One Good Death Tactile Tools workshop brought together 47 thought leaders in ageing, education and health sector to workshop how design can help to achieve a ‘good death’ for all people in the community as they reach end-of-life. The concept of a ‘good death’ was defined as one that recognises the whole-of-life contribution of people living in aged care, or in the community, as they neared death. In the workshop teams focused on improving the experience of a specific persona as they neared end-of-life, using Tactile Tools, mobile coloured discs that participants use to map out the experience of an elderly persona. The second activity, the One Good Death workshop-in-a-box, involved the creation of a co-design toolkit and posting it across Australia to geographically dispersed RMIT Master of Design Futures students. The toolkits included tactile materials that participants could use to prototype human centred design approaches to improve end-of-life experience. The toolkit replicated the sensate experiences of the studio environment in the digital domain. All participants opened their workshop-in-a-box simultaneously and engaged in remote making activities, initiating material and interpersonal empathy through a shared tactile experience.