Bringing Death to Light
Jack Riemer & Tianjian “TJ” Cheng
Death in the United States is exile—removal from the domestic spaces of care and love that are so cherished in life, to spend eternity among strangers and stones. This study challenges the discrepancy between domesticity and the spatialized idea of death, specifically reflecting on home rituals that once characterized early funerary norms. Embodying a critical perspective of the current state of funerary affairs, this work—its methodology, artifacts, and prototypical final proposal—contends that design can enable death’s reinhabitation of the home. The final creative proposal is the design of a familiar object, transfigured to facilitate accessible confrontation with death and closer proximity with loved ones who have passed.