In a world so full of life and opportunities for new experiences, it may seem utterly morbid to delve into anything even remotely hinting at the idea of death.
However, Corina Tan, 24, a recent graduate from the NUS Department of Industrial Design did exactly just that for her thesis project. She came up with a unique way to be remembered by your loved ones.
“The Last Of Me” is a service that allows you to leave messages behind for your loved ones that will be shared with them only when you have passed on. You will use the app to design an art print made up of your last words.
The team scans the obituaries daily to see if anyone in their databases has died. When it does identify someone, they then proceed to manufacture the required items and deliver them to the intended recipients.
Corina’s “The Last Of Me” was the culmination of a whole year’s work delving deep into our perceptions towards death. The service comes with a beautifully designed app. It was aimed at making the whole experience of dying a whole lot less mystifying and jarringly abrupt for the ones left behind.
As Corina explains, it all began with an unexpected encounter of a Facebook friend’s status that got her thinking about death and peoples’ perceptions about it.
“Living in urban cities like Singapore, we do not meet death often enough to know what to do in the face of it, hence it becomes something to avoid, something taboo. “
She explains further “But there is this problem about death being a taboo topic or something that we just tend to avoid. So, based on these two ideas, I tried to find connections and to design something that addresses this. ”
On peoples’ changing perceptions of death, Corina says “I feel that death anxiety in Singapore is high due to our many cultural superstitions and beliefs, but with rising education level here, Singaporeans have opened up to planning for their death and seeing it as a necessity to do so when they are still healthy.”
Currently she is still in the process of looking for collaborators for funding, research testing, app coding and developing, publicity and marketing.
Would you give this a try? What would you say?