Chapter 9: Designing for Death

This book has been written by the participants of the “Does Design Care…[3]?” workshop convened by the Belfast School of Art, Ulster University in September 2023. As the title of the workshop indicates it was the third workshop the editors of this book, have staged. They initiated the Does Design Care…? workshops as an international series of design thinking, making, and acting that provide a positive space to explore different ways to conceptualise, provoke, contest and disrupt care, plus serve as a venue for synthesising future visions of care. And the editors don’t place any limits on interpretations, boundaries, and sectors of care when and where we use the word ‘Care’.


At the workshop in Belfast they set we, the participants/Contributors, two main tasks. One resulted in a book illustrating their concepts about a “100 years of care journey” and the other is this book with its 24 chapters in response to a series of prompts under the title of the Department of Care; prompts that we will come to soon.
Martin McGinn's contribution was Chapter 9 entitled: 'Designing for Death' and compared and contrasted the never ending striving for Good Design, what it is and maps the principles of 'Good Design' by Deiter Rams to the striving for what the modern hospice movement consider a 'Good Death'. It goes on to compare the End of Life Care Serice of Life & Time, an Out of Hours Nursing service, Co-Founded by McGinn in 2017, along with Dr Henry McLaughlin and other members of his community in Rostrevor, Co Down, Northern Ireland.