Remember Death
Personal Death Planning Dashboard
As living humans we will face death one day, it is inevitable. Death is not some conspiracy theory or some made up concepts that need to be researched the truth of. No one will deny that we as mortals will perish from this earth.
For some, death is not a good thing as they cannot fathom the idea of not existing. For others, they thrive from the notion of the mortality and excel their everyday live in the consciousness of this.
As Neil deGrasse Tyson’s answer in his interview regarding death, “It is the knowledge that I am going to die that creates the focus that I bring to being alive, the urgency of accomplishments, the need to express love, now not latter.” [1]
Creating values and achieving accomplishments are things that we can do in our life time. But often times in times we fails to achieve things that we want. As much as we define ourselves with success, failures also take part in shaping our life.
During our lifetimes we are connecting our life with other peoples life, the most dominant human connection in our life is family. This human connection made our own life not really our own. If we die someone will be sad. If you are a parent then your child will be bereaved, as your lifes are tied through parent-child connection.
Accomplishing achievements and nurturing our human connections can be our priority in our life. But obviously we cannot do exclusively only them. There are other things that we need to do as they are necessary.
During our life we also do things that are not necessarily productive, but necessary, for example: sleep, commute, food, etc. We may aslo dabble on things that contra-productive: bickering, excessive social media use, etc.
All of these things that we do, use a finite resource that is the most important in our life, a resource that cannot be regenerated again no matter what. This resource is time. How we spend this resource will significantly affect our life.
Research
Death is ubiquitous. There is no living being that will not face death one day. We as human have reflected and contemplate it in many form. In this digital age, this reflection of death take many interesting expression.
Mortality, a Google Chrome browser application plugin show our timeline of life with linear visualisation of life on a square area graph [2].
Tim Urban wrote and design an interesting representation of life showed in weeks [3]. This design which show our life in retrospective of time give an objective perspective of time, where we usually think that human life goes through numberless weeks.
Through our life we are achieving things that are important to us, things that are valuable according to our values. But achievements are not the only things that colours our life. Failures also take part in it. “CV of Failures”, a concept by Stefan Melanie [4] and made viral when a Princeton professor publish his lows in career [5].
When we bring the knowledge of the inevitable death into our consciousness we can get the feelings that “time is running out” or maybe the feeling of “there is still time”. These senses of time influence our motivation and help shape our development through life [6,7].
Achieving understanding of our inevitable death and passing of life. We then can prioritise what are the important things in our life. This prioritizing will allow us to have a balance between work and life balance [8].
Practice
Exploring this concept of progressing life and the inevitability of death then factoring in aspects of life, achievements-failures, and human connection, I came up with a dashboard prototype visualizing these concepts. I titled the prototype “Remember Death : A Personal Death Planning Dashboard”.
The dashboard prototype was developed through iterations. With the first iterations sample shown in Figure 3. Then I incorporated some themes and styling and improved the prototype as shown in Figure 4.
The final prototype can be accessed online using this URL : www.rememberdeath.me with the demo on Youtube https://youtu.be/V2aXNx_mmPU
Reflection
Working on this project allow me to check on my own perception of life. My beliefs and values in the past and now. Creating the real product also expose me to some technical aspects of front-end web development. These are the things that will impact me in the future.
The final prototype is still far from done, there are still something that I am exploring to improve it:
- Incorporating API from www.population.io, the data from the app allow us to put the perspective of global population on ourselves. But I am still struggling on how to put them together as the personal nature of the dashboard I am designing.
- Show a more meaningful visualization aside of square blocks of life progressing through time. This visualization is meaningful in the dimension of time but I also want to incorporate personal achievements and failures, human connections, aspects of life on this visualization. This is something that I am still figuring out.
- The CV of failures concept see our past life, in this prototype I want to propagate the concept into the future. But the past and future is different in this sense, as we cannot change our past achievements and failures but still able to affect the results of the future. In a sense, the past things are already fixed but the future things are still in probability space, probability of failures and successes.
References
[1] King, L. (2015). Neil deGrasse Tyson: I Don’t Fear Death | Larry King Now | Ora.TV. [video] Available at: https://youtu.be/M3G9LOJZTmM [Accessed 8 May 2017].
[2] Mortality — New Tab. (2017). AO.
[3] Urban, T. (2014). Life in Weeks. [Blog] Wait but Why. Available at: http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html [Accessed 8 May 2017].
[4] Stefan, M. A CV of failures. Nature 468, 7322 (2010), 467–467.
[6] Carstensen, L.L. The influence of a sense of time on human development. Science 312, 5782 (2006), 1913–1915.
[5] Taylor, B. (2016). Write a Failure Résumé to Learn What Makes You Succeed. [online] Harvard Business Review. Available at: https://hbr.org/2016/05/write-a-failure-resume-to-learn-what-makes-you-succeed [Accessed 8 May 2017].
[7] Kotter-Grühn, D. and Smith, J. When time is running out: changes in positive future perception and their relationships to changes in well-being in old age. Psychology and aging 26, 2 (2011), 381–387.
[8] Sturges, J. and Guest, D. Working to live or living to work? Work/life balance early in the career. Human Resource Management Journal 14, 4 (2004), 5–20.
