MOTH: Design For Life & Death
MOTH: Design For Life & Death is a project established by Senior Lecturers in Graphic Design Ashley Rudolph and Nikki Salkeld.
Project details
| Project lead | Ashley Rudolph and Nikki Salkeld |
|---|
Over the past 12 years Moth has grown a multidisciplinary practice engaging in both speculative academic research projects, as well as applied design solutions. It examines both formal conventions as well as future-thinking how death, dying and grief, in (a largely secular) society can be made more visual (grief aesthetics). Investigating how we can confidently express ‘negative’ emotions in both the digital and analogue realm, creating evolved graphic visual language to help navigate grief and sadness and to communicate empathy and loss in our social relationships.
Graphic design is a discipline that constantly evolves in order to accommodate changes in culture, society and technology, it is well placed to embrace difficult questions about mortality, aid understanding and provide relevant visual signifiers in the context of death. The limitary nature of the design brief inspires designers to seek problems and distinguish new opportunities and relationships, beyond the form and function and aesthetic of objects, brands and experiences. It can give courage to see death as being something to learn from rather than simply fear, and recognition of this can simultaneously, liberate and ground us, making us grateful for the life we live and reminding us to live it well. Moth believes that we should all expect considered design, beautiful craft and meaningful choices in death as we do in life.
In September 24. Moth with Dr Robyn Cook and Ian Walden PHD hosted a conference: Death x Design x Culture: Radical Re-imaginings For The End Of Life: [In partnership with Stamps School of Art & Design, University of Michigan (USA), the Glasgow End of Life Studies Group, University of Glasgow (UK), and Death and Culture Network, University of York (UK)].
The conference aim was to provide a discursive space for ‘traditional’ as well as practice-based and practice-led research to critically reflect on the role of design as it relates to death, dying, and disposal at individual, community, and broader cultural levels, and to suggest radical alternatives for the future.
With a focus on interdisciplinarity, the conference aimed to support knowledge exchange between researchers within the social sciences, the humanities, and design. Design is positioned as an expanded field inviting contributions from subject areas including, but not limited to: graphic design; multidisciplinary design; architecture; digital design; fashion design; and product design. A multi-modal approach to expand the conventions of a conference format, incorporating experience design; exhibitions and pedagogic interventions; university-industry knowledge transfer; and opportunities for traditional academic papers.
As well as hosting the Death x Design x Culture Moth also contributed three significant projects:
1. Symbols of Death: [The Emotionalisation of Graphic Symbols]. An Industry and International student Project. This project aimed to create a collective digital vocabulary of pictorial signs to articulate and communicate the nuances of death, dying and grief. Utilising the emotionalisation of graphic symbols to express our inner world of feelings to the outside world. To re-imagine how we talk about death, dying and grief in the digital realm. The project produced a diverse range of submissions which communicated both personal grief as well as collective solidarity and empathy in our social-cultural relationships.
The Background to the project: Initiated after a conversation following the massacre at Utøya, MOTH
reflected upon the lack of suitable visual symbols used to articulate universal sympathy in the context of death and bereavement. Most of the social media messages posted in response to the massacre used
the black heart emoji, symbolic of compassion around death 🖤. This prompted inspiring questions about the lack of appropriate and meaningful visual signifiers of mortality and highlighted our inability to discuss the complexities of death as freely as we discuss love.
2. Moth Design for Life & Death: archive of work highlighting selected projects over a 12 year period.
3. An Extra Place at The Table Conference dinner – A curated event which seeks to reclaims the table as a physical and metaphorical place to break bread and boundaries, and to question our relationship with dying, death and grief. The dinner table provides a welcoming space where we can remember our lost loved ones and continue to hold them dear. We can move forward with them, to create enduring and meaningful legacies, assimilating the dead into lives of the living. In this project Moth explores different aspects of the funeral feast: as commemoration, celebration and communion. From sin eating to séance, from cocktails to last suppers, from the macabre to the melancholy. It seeks to connect the living and dead through bereavement rituals and memorialisation practices, and focuses on Euro-American cultures where dying, death and grief are often febrile topics of discussion.
4. An Extra Place at The Table. A publication in the format of a twelve course menu of questions inviting conversations about death, dying and legacy, with friends and loved ones around the dinner table. A space to talk about fears, hopes, loves and needs, and to make peace with the future knowing that wishes are shared with our nearest and dearest.
Project team
Falmouth University team
Nicola Salkeld
Senior Lecturer / Course Co-ordinator (Stage 1)
Nicola is one half of MOTH, which is a research project, that investigates the skills and contributi...
Ashley Rudolph
Senior Lecturer, Graphic Design
Ashley is a Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design within the School of Communication at Falmouth Univers...
Dr Robyn Cook
Senior Lecturer
Dr Robyn Cook is a senior lecturer in the Department of Graphic. Since 2023 she has worked ...
Paul Mulraney
Lecturer, Film
Paul is a lecturer in the School of Film and Television, teaching general film practice across all l...
Ian Walden
Thesis title: A good death: Creating discursivity around end of life choices through design. ...
Other staff:
- Prof Bruce Tharp & Prof Stephanie Tharp, Stamps School of Art & Design, University of Michigan (USA)
- Dr Naomi Richards, Glasgow End of Life Studies Group, University of Glasgow (UK),
- Dr Julie Rugg, Death and Culture Network, University of York (UK)
- DR. Bethan Michael-Fox, The Death Studies Podcast.
Partners
MOTH Partners include:
- Shannon Larkin. Royal College of Art. Advanced Knowledge Transfer Research Associate. NEMO | UNESCO Ocean Decade.
- Aura Murillo Louise Skajem Resting Reef. NEMO | UNESCO Ocean Decade.
- Dr Robyn Cook, Senior Lecturer, Falmouth University, UK
- Bruce M. Tharp & Stephanie Tharp. Professor, Industrial Design University of Michigan Stamps School of Art & Design
- Dr Naomi Richards. Director of the Glasgow End of Life Studies Group at the University of Glasgow.
- Ian Walden. PHD Falmouth University. A good death: Creating discursivity around end of life choices through design.
- Dr Julie-Marie Strange, Professor of Modern British History at Durham University.
- Diane James, manager, Blue Cross Pet Bereavement Support Services.
- Dr Kate Sellen, Canada Research Chair in Health Design, Associate Professor, Faculty of Design OCADU.
- Dr Mark Taubert, Clinical Director |Consultant in Palliative Medicine at Velindre, NHS Trust, Cardiff.
- Dr Tony Walter, Professor of Death Studies /| Director of University of Baths Centre for Death & Society.
- Joe Macleod, Closure Experience designer, writer.
- Henrietta Boex, Director of Falmouth Art Gallery.
- Dr Stephen Cave, Writer, critic and philosopher, Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge.
- Lucy Willow, Senior Lecturer Falmouth University, The Art of Grief | ASDS.
- Dr Lucy Selman, Senior Research Fellow Palliative and End of Life Care Research Group at the University of Bristol.
- Ben James, Creative Director at Jotta Design.
- Anna Kiernan, Senior Lecturer in Creativity and Innovation at Exeter University.
- Elsa Richardson, Cultural Historian, Chancellor’s Fellow in the History of Health and Wellbeing at the University of Strathclyde.
- Clare Hearn, Experience Design Lecturer, Cultural Management & Production at Falmouth University.
- Prof. Stefan Bufler & Prof. Michael Wörgötter, Hochschule Augsburg University of Applied Sciences.
- Charlotte Heal, Art Director and Designer.
- Michael Petry, Artist, Author, and Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) London.
Outputs & outcomes
A range of both speculative academic research projects, as well as applied design solutions: projects, products, papers, workshops, symposiums, conferences, panels, podcasts.
Impact & recognition
- Providing interdisciplinary, multi modal and critically focused research within communication design practice.
- Providing integrated research led teaching practice, where students and graduates continue to impact and contribute to society and the environment.
- Fostering a growing network of critically engaged collaborators within Falmouth University, as well as national and international partners.
Through the discipline of Graphic Design, Moth has investigated the importance of ideas as triggers of creativity, as devices for narrative and as loci for opportunities of chance and transition in the context of loss, bereavement and death symbolism. Providing platforms for creative exchange and contribution, to equip us to talk about death with greater confidence, giving us courage to see death as being something we can learn from rather than fear. Reducing anxiety and depression in surviving relatives and offering empowerment and opportunities of legacy for the dying. Work examines our relationship with bereavement and what we believe might happen, when the one inevitable event we plan for the least comes to visit.
Over the past 12 years Nicola and Ashley have collaborated with and contributed to organisations including: The Death & Culture Network (DaCNet) University of York, Royal College of Art, University of Michigan Stamps School of Art & Design, the University of Glasgow, The Blue Cross, Pet Loss Network, OCAD_Ontario College of Art & Design University University Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Velindre University NHS Trust, Cardiff University School of Medicine, , CDAS University of Baths Centre for Death & Society, Falmouth Art Gallery, University of Bristol, Jotta Design, Exeter University, University of Strathclyde, Augsburg University of Applied Sciences, Dongyang Mirae University in Seoul, South Korea, University of Johannesburg, South Africa, International Contemporary Art Festival' Kuopio, Finland, The Association for the Study of Death and Society (ASDS) | Artist Group, The Art of Death Society, The Death Positive Library. The University of Northumbria, Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
- Sept 2024; Death x Design x Culture: Radical Re-imaginings For The End Of Life: Conference In partnership with the Stamps School of Art & Design, University of Michigan (USA), the Glasgow End of Life Studies Group, University of Glasgow (UK), and Death and Culture Network, University of York (UK).
- Sept 2024; An Extra Place at The Table Curated Experience Design event. Green Bank Hotel, Falmouth
- An Extra Place at The Table Publication.
- July 2023; Paper | Conference paper. Dark Economies Haunted Landscapes: Nature, Super-Nature, and Global Environments — Falmouth University, UK.
- Sept 2022; Conference Paper: The Death & Culture Network (DaCNet) University of York, St John University.
- July; 2021 Paper | Conference_ Dark Economies: Anxious Futures, Fearful Pasts — Falmouth University, UK.
- Oct 2021, Panel [online] The Death Positive Library. The University of Northumbria
- Oct 2021; Workshop: run by The Blue Cross at The Museum of the Home | London. Pet Bereavement Café, with MOTH: ‘Saying Goodbye to Mr Jim’. Booklet and workshop to help children and adults cope with bereavement.
- Nov 2021 Moth Workshop: For Exeter Festival of Compassion. Exeter University.
- January 2020; Keynote Lecture at OCAD Toronto, Canada: 'Dying.dialogues'
- Symposium on design for end of life running in conjunction with DesignTO, with collaborators from the Health Design Studio at OCADU and Taboo Health.
- Available in Falmouth's Research Repository (FURR): Dying.dialogues Jan 24 - Jan 25 2020
- September 2019; 'ANTI – International Contemporary Art Festival' Kuopio, Finland
- MOTH contribution: In The Face of Death / The Art of Dying.
- Available in Falmouth's Research Repository (FURR): In The Face of Death / The Art of Dying. ANTI International Contemporary Art Festival Kuopio, Finland.
- July 2019 - September 2019; An Extra Place at the Table: Food and Funeral Feasting
- 01. Epitaph | With Anna Kiernan | Senior Lecturer in Creativity and Innovation at Exeter University.
- 02. Publication | With Elsa Richardson | Cultural Historian, Chancellor's Fellow in the History of Health and Wellbeing at the University of Strathclyde.
- 03. Death over Dinner Event | With Clare Hearn | Experience Design Lecturer, Cultural Management & Production at Falmouth University.
- September 2019; Conference Paper at the University of Bath
- Centre for Death & Society for the 14th International Conference on the social context of Death, Dying & Disposal.
