Prototype 3- Making end-of-life experience poetic

Last time, we talked about puzzle collage poster and how it lacked potential buy-in from a patient and lacked emotional/personal aspect. We felt we were stuck in a pothole, because we could not think of a good way to make our solution poetic. All we thought about was how to merge our research about end of life care to people’s lives and overcome people’s fear about death. However, we found a good opportunity to hear about other people’s perspective. We needed to refresh our minds.

Death Cafe

Kristin introduced death cafe event during our faculty check-in as a way to help us get out of a pothole we got ourselves into. We decided to go, because it was an opportunity to explore other perspectives about death. Unfortunately, the time conflicted with another of my commitment, only Popo could have the experience of talking to other people. Popo brought an interesting story of a lady, that led us to an important lesson.

Popo told the story about an old lady who sat on the same table as him during the death cafe. She had a sister who had cancer. For the first 7 years her sister had cancer, her sister never talked anything related to death, such as advanced directives, wills, and wishes, mainly due to fear of death. But one day, her sister suddenly started to talk about death and advanced directives. An old lady said her sister came to a true acceptance that she is dying and does not have much time left.

Important lesson

Through this story, we realized a very important lesson. A true buy-in of end-of-life experience can only be achieved through an acceptance of one’s situation. We learned that realizing one’s situation(people usually try to neglect the situation they are in because they are afraid to look at the truth) will eventually lead to acceptance that they don’t have much time left than they imagined. We hope that this acceptance will eventually result in better end-of-life experience

Our solutions

Event Planning:

We wanted our solution to be in the realm of event planning, and executing events to foster conversation with each other and spend more quality time together before the time runs out. This idea was kept from our puzzle collage. We included collaboration aspect to enforce more engagement from both parties

Event Recording Bracelet:

Our solution was a bracelet that people can wear and customize. The idea is that for every event they execute, people can add specific beed depending on what kind of event it was(casual: having dinner together, more event-like activities: having a picnic for a whole day, wish-list events: go to grand daughter’s wedding, travel to Chile). As people see the bracelet fill up, they will realize they are spending quality times together and do not have too much time left, and eventually come to acceptance of patient’s death. And we assumed that this will help people to talk about their end-of-life.

Feedback

The main feedback was that we steered too much to “poetic” way. We neglected the connection to end-of-life experience and all the research we have done so far. What we came up with was possibly a good solution to literally event-making tool. While keeping the idea of collaboration, we somehow needed to implicitly include fostering better end-of-life experience. Also, not everyone likes to wear bracelet; we need to consider other social factors as well.