Reconnecting Death into Human Life
Mona M. Hamdy
M.F.A. Design for Sustainability SCAD
Scott Boylston (Chair)
David E. Meyers Dr. Satyakam Sharma
This presentation explores themes of death, dying, grief, and end-of-life care. Images and language related to mortality appear throughout.
You are welcome to:
This research was conducted with the same care and dignity it advocates for.
Your presence here is a gift.
Before we speak of death, let us feel ourselves alive.
Notice your breath. Notice your feet on the floor.
Notice who is in this room with you.
اجلس معي. أنا هنا معك.
Sit with me. I am here with you.
My mother died in a place that was technically competent and entirely wrong for her. The rooms were efficient, the staff were kind, but nothing about that space was meant for a human being leaving this world with dignity.
That gap between clinical excellence and human dignity became the question that drove this research. What would a good death look like, if it were designed for?
400+ sources reviewed across intersecting fields
Historical medicalization; death avoidance as cultural construction; Kastenbaum's death systems; Death Positivity.
Public Health models; hospice design; dignity-centered frameworks; the care ecosystem home to hospital.
Environmental impact on healing; biophilic principles; sensory clinical environments; spatial dignity.
Benyus adaptive systems; chameleon iridophore mechanics; Living Building Challenge; regenerative design.
Service blueprinting; touchpoint design; stakeholder ecosystems; equity and access in care delivery.
Tuskegee legacy; racial disparities in hospice access; Black communities and medical mistrust.
A major medical coalition making an unprecedented call: that death had been over-medicalized, stripped of meaning, and that design intervention was part of the answer.
"Dying has been turned over to medicine, removed from families and communities, and stripped of meaning. It does not have to be this way."
The Lancet Commission on the Value of Death, 2022
Five conditions the Commission identifies as essential to dignified death
Death as a communal event, not an isolated medical procedure
Death returned to familiar environments when possible and wished
Advance care planning; patient voice; dignity-centered decisions
Universal access regardless of race, income, or geography
Death as contribution to community and meaning, not just biological endpoint
The Lancet framework became the scaffolding against which each design intervention was evaluated.
Death is not a medical event. It is a system with reinforcing loops that perpetuate avoidance, and balancing loops that create the conditions for dignity.
Labord's chameleons of Madagascar display an involuntary, chaotic explosion of color as they die. Their nervous systems send uncontrolled signals to nanocrystals in their skin, producing the most vivid display of their lives in their final moments.
It was not a metaphor I sought. It found me. Here was a creature whose death was its most expressive act, not a failure, but a final, full utterance of life. I knew this was the biological frame for everything I was trying to design.
Dying neurons send involuntary signals to iridophores, light-reflecting nanocrystals, creating an unrepeatable final display.
60+ participants across General Community, Medical/Palliative Providers, Deathcare Professionals, and Caregivers.
Physicians, chaplains, death doulas, and community leaders including Dr. Joshua Black on death dreams.
Diaries, photo prompts, and storyboards to surface the sensory and emotional texture of how people experience death.
Immersive fieldwork in ICU and palliative settings. Observation of lived experiences at real end-of-life encounters.
The card game as a research instrument, generating both behavioral data and qualitative insight through facilitated reflection.
Collaborative design sessions with multidisciplinary stakeholders, co-prototyping interventions in real time.
From the Celtic tradition: the concept of the anam cara, the soul friend who accompanies another through the most profound transitions of life, including death.
Over two years, I completed an apprenticeship in accompaniment-based care through the Sacred Art of Living Center. This was not background research. It was a practice, one that shaped every design decision that followed.
To accompany someone dying is to sit at the threshold between what we understand and what we cannot. Design, at its most human, asks for the same.
Two-year formal apprenticeship
Present for five deaths during research phase
Methodological foundation and design influence, embedded in Chapters 2, 3, 5, and 6
The research did not stay in the survey. It walked into ICUs, sat in living rooms, attended "Dancing for Della," and bore witness to how structural inequity shapes who dies well in America.
NHPCO 2021 Data
Observed clinical environments and how space, silence, and protocol shape dying. The dignity gap is physical.
Community healing event for Black families navigating grief. Named for Della, who died alone. A structural story told through one life.
Accompanied families managing dying outside institutions. Documented the emotional and logistical gaps design could address.
Medical mistrust in Black communities is not irrational. It is documented history. Design must answer to this.
She coordinates medications, medical appointments, insurance claims, overnight care, and emotional support for her husband while managing her own grief invisibility. No one asks how she is doing.
"I don't have time to fall apart. There is no one to fall apart to."
Carl has expressed wishes for a quiet death at home, surrounded by familiar things. He is dying in a fluorescent ward he has never felt comfortable in. His chart has no record of this preference.
"I just want the window open. I want to hear the birds."
Across all four cohorts, near-universal agreement that death is natural and not to be feared at the conceptual level.
A 36-point gap between belief and action. Death is "natural" in theory, unspeakable in practice.
Research-derived design criteria that governed all subsequent intervention development
58% planning gap demands tools that make the conversation accessible, not clinical, not morbid, and not optional.
88% comfort preference demands environments and systems designed for the whole person, not the diagnosis.
72% caregiver burden rate demands tools that treat the family system as the unit of care, not just the patient.
Cultural silence demands upstream tools that expand community fluency around mortality before crisis arrives.
29-point hospice access gap demands explicit centering of underserved communities, beginning with co-design.
82% home preference demands systems that return dying to families and communities, not just institutions.
Each criterion directly traceable to primary research findings Chapter 4 to Chapter 5 bridge
A framework for designing systems that are adaptive, context-responsive, and regenerative rather than static and standardized. The chameleon does not perform. It simply responds truthfully to its conditions.
If a chameleon's most vivid expression is its last, then design should create the conditions for a person's dying to be equally full, equally expressive, and equally their own.
Each intervention is designed to function independently and in concert. Together they span pre-death, active dying, and post-death across community and clinical settings.
A play-mediated, facilitated conversation tool using 42 reflective prompts across five domains to lower psychological barriers and open end-of-life conversations before crisis arrives.
Primary research N = 60+ Four cohorts
According to Donella Meadows, the most powerful place to intervene in a system is at the level of paradigms, the beliefs and assumptions that create the rules in the first place.
Reframes death as natural and communal, not as medical failure
Redefines success as dignified dying with communal presence, not life extension
Normalizes mortality conversation in community settings
Creates channels for end-of-life preferences before crisis arrives
Augmento Mori operates at multiple leverage points simultaneously, making it a high-impact, upstream cultural intervention. Change at the level of paradigm is more durable than structural tweaks.
An AI-driven agentic companion for patients, caregivers, and clinical teams at the intersection of dying and dignity.
Where Augmento Mori works upstream in community, HeartBloom works downstream inside the clinical system, at the point where dying is actively happening. It bridges the gap between what patients want and what systems know how to deliver.
Patient — communicate preferences, comfort levels, and wishes when words become difficult
Caregiver — alleviates invisible labor, provides guidance, reduces burnout and isolation
Clinical — connects social workers, reduces gap-bridging burden, flags dignity preferences
AMINA'S INFLUENCE
"Hi, Amina. I am here for you."
The first words HeartBloom speaks to its user
Survey sample of 60+ respondents, primarily English-speaking and US-based, limits global generalizability. Cultural findings are contextually rich and intentionally so.
Personal loss, Anam Cara practice, and direct death accompaniment create methodological richness and potential bias simultaneously. This is named throughout, not minimized.
Both primary interventions are at prototype and concept validation stage. Clinical implementation requires regulatory review, accessibility testing, and longitudinal outcomes study.
HeartBloom's platform requires device access and literacy. Rural, elderly, and under-resourced populations may face access barriers requiring deliberate design attention.
Eight language editions represent an aspiration toward cultural inclusion, not a claim of completion. Each edition requires validation by cultural insiders, which is initiated but not concluded.
Dignity is the central design criterion and the hardest to measure. Developing dignity-specific evaluation frameworks is a research gap this work flags and does not fully resolve.
An agentic AI layer carries the person from the community conversation phase into the clinical companion, preferences and values traveling from kitchen table to bedside.
The palliative space augmented by HeartBloom through environmental sensors, adaptive lighting, and biophilic responsive design. Spaces that know the patient.
Expanding cultural editions through co-design with communities, not translation but genuine cultural authorship. Every community deserves this conversation in their own death language.
Deepening the Dancing for Della thread, building tools specifically for communities with justified medical mistrust, with community advocates as co-designers from the beginning.
A world where the question "what does a good death look like?" is answered by communities, not algorithms, and where design has done its work quietly, building the conditions for that answer to be possible.
Survey data across four unique cohorts, including deathcare professionals, on contemporary attitudes toward death, with findings not previously synthesized in design literature.
First application of Labord's chameleon "Colorful Farewell" as a design biomimicry framework for dignified dying environments and service design.
Formalization of Celtic accompaniment practice as a research and design methodology for dignity-centered work, documented with peer-reviewed sources and primary practice.
Six interventions designed to span pre-death through post-death, upstream through clinical, community through individual, unified by a shared theoretical framework.
Design interventions rooted in community wisdom, biomimicry, and dignity-centered frameworks can shift cultural relationships with mortality, moving away from over-medicalized, clinically detached approaches toward regenerative, relational end-of-life experiences.
Design for Sustainability SCAD Spring 2026
Thank you for accompanying me through my thesis.
It is a reckoning with how we care for each other at the threshold.
May those who are dying die well.(Plot twist, that's all of us!)
May those who are grieving be held.
May those who are designing do so with humility and love.
يعدونني مجنوناً لأنني لا أبيع أيامي بالذهب، وأعدهم مجانين لأنهم يظنون أن لأيامي ثمناً.
They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold; and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price.
Mona M. Hamdy
M.F.A. Design for Sustainability SCAD 6 March 02026
www.augmentomori.com