Designing for Death: The Bizarre Appeal of Aestheticizing the Afterlife

Design is inextricably tied to life—after all, it is the primary means for shaping the worlds we inhabit and making our spaces our own—but it is also just as pertinent to the void left in its absence, though less widely considered. Regardless of the vast cultural and secular perspectives on death and afterlife, objects are ultimately a tangible bridge between the living and the dead, artifacts that live on in the liminal space past our own mortality.

“Humans have always aestheticized death in some way—from Catholic churches adorning skeletons with jewels and Victorians selling death merch like mourning bicycles and stationary to our American funeral industry’s obsession with making the dead appear to be alive,” explains Sarah Chavez, executive director of The Order of the Good Death, an organization dedicated to promoting mortality acceptance and advocating for natural burial legislation reform.

Immortalizing death manifests in a variety of physical sights, including altars, cemeteries, and sacred spaces, to rituals, such as lighting Yahrzeit candles during Shiva in Judaism to decorating one’s space for Día de Muertos in Mexico. Mangda Sengvanhpheng, a New York City–based artist, end-of-life care practitioner, and founder of BACII notes that materiality of death culture is rooted in the complexity and unanswerability of the subject. “When we lose people, it’s such a life changing experience—it’s so abrupt and we often don’t think about it until it happens, but objects become a remembrance of the people we want to keep alive.”

Cultural perspectives on death and afterlife through art

As death photographer, author, and journalist Johanna Ebenstein notes in her online journal Morbid Anatomy, only in the United States are images and representations of death absent in daily discourse. But many cultures and religions outside of our Eurocentric cultural ecosystem prioritize the art and design of death rituals as a way to honor the deceased. Coffins, which were first invented as simple stone structures decorated in feathers and shells during the Stone Age, have become increasingly elaborate with custom ornamentation, lid carvings, and moldings over time. In Ancient Egypt, people believed that the soul could only reach the afterlife through an elaborate system of mummification, so they would paint stone coffins with images of the deceased’s journey into the afterlife.

While some religions such as Judaism prefer simple stone gravestones out of respect and little scripture about afterlife, many cultures that do believe in afterlife still customize coffins to facilitate the transition. For example, renowned fantasy coffin artist Paa Joe pays homage to the Ghanaian beliefs around life and death through abeduu adeka, meticulously carved and painted end-of-life vessels that symbolize the deceased through living and inanimate objects. “When someone dies the family visits the studio with an image of the deceased occupation or a replica of the deceased while alive,” Joe explains. “Though 50% of people in Ghana get buried in proverbial coffins due to the changing death rate and graveyard sizes since the early ’50s, believing in life after death is a tradition that hasn’t changed and is still carefully observed through these coffins.”

Art is also a central conduit between life and the afterlife in Buddhist cultures. For instance, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition “Anxiety and Hope in Japanese Art” showcased a 15th-century figure with a textured hand representing the physical reality of the deceased, as well as depictions of Amida Buddha with dangling silk cords as a means for a passing person to connect with him. Similarly, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco’s “Comparative Hell: Arts of Asian Underworlds,” which was previously on view at the Asia Society of New York, shows varying depictions of eternity, such as the Iranian American artist Afruz Amighi’s “Spirit Canopy,” an installation filled with metal chains tethered to the ceiling that represent deceased souls hovering above us.

The contemporary American discourse around death

“But in Western society—particularly in secular communities—discourse around death, loss, and grief is largely avoided until it occurs, despite death being one of life’s only guaranteed and universal experiences,” Sengvanhpheng says. As the US propels towards a historic increase in the annual death rate, however, millennials such as herself are training cultural criticism towards what journalist Jessica Mitford coined as this “American way of death” in her 1963 exposé on the funeral industry.

Chavez credits her partner, Caitlin Doughty of The Order of the Good Death, as an early pioneer of this cultural paradigm shift. The LA-based millennial funeral director, who addresses everything death-related from corpses to decomposition in her Addams Family–esque garb in her YouTube series “Ask a Mortician,” may have initially seemed like a province of goth subculture. But Doughty’s central question (“Why are there a zillion websites and references for being sex positive but nothing for being death positive?”) has helped shift the wider contemporary dialogue around death. “A growing number of people were acknowledging the need for change, so we began to build a community of people, everyone from funeral industry professionals to academics, designers, and artists who were exploring ways to reframe what was possible at the end of life,” Chavez reflects.

While our culture was familiar with labor doulas, postpartum doulas, and abortion doulas, National Geographic reports that it wasn’t until the COVID-19 pandemic that Americans began turning towards nonmedical death support as well. As of January 2024, the National End-of-Life Doula Alliance (NEDA)’s membership skyrocketed from 260 in 2019 to over 1,500. Research continues to show that the vast majority of practicing doulas are based in Canada, Australia, and the US, where conversation around death was stigmatized and stunted in comparison to the rest of the world. Sengvanhpheng says that she works increasingly with not only those who are navigating grief, but also those who are navigating their own mortality. “We need more support in our institutional spaces for those who are in the dying process themselves,” she insists.

Chavez adds that “health care professionals are reporting that, instead of avoiding talking about death, patients are initiating conversations about their end-of-life wishes, and more people are taking advantage of hospice care.” She continues, “When we held the first Death Salon in 2013, there were no events like it, but today death positive events can be found across the US and are incorporated regularly into programming at libraries, universities, and cultural institutions.”

Millennials have continued to pioneer non-medical death-related services, such as The Dinner Party, a support group catered to 20 and 30-something-year-old’s who have lost a loved one; Deadhappy, a British pay-as-you-go life insurance start-up; and WeCroak, a memento mori app that notifies its 30,000 monthly subscribers five times a day that they’re going to die (presumably to help them live in the moment.)

Cemeteries as a design destination

As our culture broadens conversations around death, death spaces are becoming a greater point of focus in the design world. Cemeteries like the Historic Mount Vernon are hot real estate commodities, and other ones like Green-Wood Cemetery are even tourist attractions. Back in April, Emilia Petrarca, a fashion and culture writer, hosted a private trolley tour for her 32nd birthday party at Green-Wood “I know it may seem weird to celebrate your birthday at a cemetery, but I actually think it’s the perfect day to go,” she explains. “The tour and the mausoleums themselves are a celebration of the lives these people lead. Of course, I always want to be respectful when I visit. It’s an active cemetery and there are people there visiting the graves of their loved ones. I don’t want to say it’s fun; it’s a really beautiful, profound place, and I think birthdays are days we reflect on our lives, no matter what we’re doing. I feel some sense of grief every time I visit but in a way that’s cathartic and appropriate. It also makes me appreciate being alive!”

Similarly, the fashion company 5000 held their SS25 NYFW presentation, which was inspired by the counterculture of the Mahubay Gardens (a Bay Area punk landmark) at Marble Cemetery, fixating on its cultural connotations and history beyond its purpose as a burial ground site. “Choosing the Marble Cemetery was important because of the parallels with the ethos of the collection,” says Taylor Thompson, founder of 5000. “It became a canvas for us to convey that tension between heritage and rebellion, history and modernity. Most people enjoy the Marble Cemetery for its landscape and scenery. It was quite a beautiful day, so everyone was just enjoying the sun and the collection. You don’t realize you’re in a cemetery until it’s brought up!”

Designing your own death

As millennials pave the way towards death positivity, they are not only finding greater aesthetic value in the design of death spaces, but also taking greater agency in designing their own. “The number one thing is to figure out your intention,” Sengvanhpheng emphasizes in regards to working with clients to craft their spaces. “Are you trying to create joy? A peaceful transition? Grief-tending? A sense of normalcy? It’s important to figure out what you need from your space—as well as its limitations in the context of a hospice setting, for example—and then we start to bring in the elements.”

Sengvanhpheng will walk her clients through selecting objects, scents, and material belongings to fill their space with intentionality as they grapple with the reality of their own deaths. (This process inspired her to create an incense line for those battling with grief.) “Space really impacts your psyche and well-being, but it’s not always at the forefront of people’s minds when they are grappling with something as grave as death,” she says. “So I work with my clients on curating what feelings they want to evoke.”

According to the National Funeral Directors Association, 16% of millennials believe people should plan their own funerals before the age of 40, while only 6% of people over 60 believe people should plan their own at all. End-of-life help sites such as Lantern and Cake, which target those in their late 20s and 30s, also help users plan their own deaths, while boutique funeral homes allow for highly personalized funeral services. The London-based Exit Here, a funeral home decked in velvet upholstery; Sparrow, a contemporary Brooklyn funeral home infused with incense and dressed in a dusty rose and forest green color palette; and Áltima, a chain with 40 locations in the Catalonia region that builds parlors that resemble art galleries, all offer their clients the ability to personalize their own funerals down to every detail, from the aesthetic and funeral agenda to bereavement group options after the passing.

“When it comes to the design of funerals, rituals, and death spaces, there is sometimes ambiguity and tension around who it’s being done for,” Sengvanhpheng explains. “Are choices being made for the person dying, or is it for the people who will stay and want to hold onto them? How much say does someone have in the design of their own death? But our increasingly open death culture allows people to take a greater role in considering their own before it happens.”

Accessibility and sustainability after life

Naturally, these personalized experiences often come with a higher price tag, but many are increasingly interested in green burials, where the body is neither cremated nor prepared with embalming chemicals. According to a 2023 study by the National Funeral Directors Association, the median cost of a personalized funeral with a coffin and burial is $8,300, not including the burial plot itself, which ranges from the hundred to tens of thousands depending on the state and whether it’s a publicly or privately owned estate.

But while personalized funeral homes like Exit Here offer a signature wooden coffin at 1,950 pounds (about $2,5000), a biodegradable cardboard option is only 570 pounds ($730), taking the average cost of a green burial to just over a thousand dollars. The biodegradable coffin allows the grave site to return to nature and the body to completely decompose, leaving minimal or even positive environmental impact. The Green Burial Council estimates that a natural burial process sequesters 25 pounds of carbon dioxide by avoiding energy-intensive fertilization, watering, and maintenance.

With millennials leading chills, composting bills that expand the legalization of Natural Organic Reduction have been passed in 12 states, leading to greater ubiquity of green burial options at funeral homes. Full-service green funeral homes like Recompose turn human remains back into soils, while Life After Death in Brooklyn intends to turn industrial brownfields and urban sites into cemeteries with new parks for local communities.

“When we started this work a decade ago, getting people to talk about death and things like sustainable funeral options were framed as a trend or fad, and headlines were more along the lines of ‘Death is Having a Moment,’” Chavez recalls. “But we’ve been able to turn that “moment” into an international movement that has had an incredible impact, especially when you consider that funerals and the way we do death in America really hasn’t changed for the past century. Death-care professionals all agree that they are seeing unprecedented change. Consumers are demanding more choice, affordable options, and more control and involvement.”