Death by Design

Minimizing your mortal footprint, or how to write a shopping list — literally — with the dead.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” according to the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. If you want to understand the life cycle in more specific molecular detail, though, you should look to a surprising disciplinary source. That’s because the most contemporary thinking on decomposition doesn’t come from religion or science; it comes from industrial design.

Perhaps it’s the passing of another year that has us thinking about the ultimate human passage. That’s right: today we’re all about death. More specifically, it’s about designerly approaches to death, and why this topic merits interest for reasons beyond aesthetic fetishism. The objects we’re considering today illustrate how design can imbue death with dignity, while also creating value for the people and earth that remain behind — not a bad legacy to leave.

SPIRITREE

Recipient of an honorable mention in I.D. magazine’s 2009 Annual Design Review, Spiritree is one option for those looking to leave the lightest footprint at the end of their lives. (As an aside, we were dismayed to learn that I.D. is itself meeting an untimely end because of the death of its publishing model. RIP, I.D.)

Spiritree is a futuristic-looking pod that transforms the traditional funerary urn into something that looks like the lovechild of Karim Rashid’s brain and a bird feeder. Spiritree’s website cites eco-entrepreneur Paul Hawken as an inspiration, and we can see why. Designed by Arquitectura/Diseño in Puerto Rico, the Spiritree turns remains into fertile fodder for “a living memorial in the form of a tree.” Its pieces are intended to biodegrade as the seeds added to it germinate; and the pod’s ceramic upper half eventually cracks as the emerging plant grows strong enough to break it.

We don’t like to talk or think about what happens to our mortal coils when we shuffle them off, but, like all of our remains, they have to go somewhere.

And like much else we humans leave behind as a species, we haven’t been good at disposing of ourselves. Death is a resource-intensive business. By some estimates, 200 million pounds of steel are used each year to build caskets; many are also lined with copper or zinc. Embalming usually involves carcinogenic chemicals — not much of a concern for the recently departed, but definitely bad when they eventually leach into our groundwater. And many cemeteries encourage water waste and other landscaping evils.

POST-MORTEM PROJECT

Thankfully, intrepid industrial designers like Nadine Jarvis have been ruminating on the vessels via which we meet our earthly rest.

Jarvis’s thesis project at the University of London took the form of a series of alternative proposals for the post mortem. In Carbon Copies, Jarvis turned cremains into a lifetime supply of pencils — 240 to be exact — to be used by the deceased’s survivors. Rest in Pieces takes the form of a ceramic urn suspended from a tree; the cord from which it hangs deteriorates over a period of one to three years, at which point the urn drops and smashes, scattering its contents.

Jarvis’s Bird Feeders gesture at reincarnation, relying on birds’ ingestion of the ash and seeds that comprise the pieces. Her work engages the grieving process with elegance, enlarging through form the spaces in which we mourn. Pieces from Jarvis’s post-mortem research are in the collections of London’s Design Museum and Funeria, the founding agency behind the only (to our knowledge, anyway) biennial for funerary artwork, Ashes to Art.

ECOPOD

Finally, for cradle-to-cradle coffins, look no further than the Ecopod. Made by hand from recycled paper products, Ecopod was designed by natural-birthing practitioner Hazel Selina. Selina created the product in response to a friend’s death and her research around the limitations of traditional casket and coffin design. Ecopods come in a variety of colors (including the gorgeous gold version above), and can be screen printed with various designs or lined with feathers. We weren’t surprised to learn that the UK-based Selina was fascinated by ancient Egyptian burial rituals, since the Ecopod looks like what we imagine a 21st-century Tutankhamun might choose for his own final rest.

We realize that since the world couldn’t even agree on carbon limits at Copenhagen, we’re unlikely to see mass reform around such a personal topic as death. Still, it’s at least worth considering how we might, in our final act, try to leave the earth better rather than worse for our wear. For more resources on green burials, visit the non-profit Green Burial Council.

Kirstin Butler is writing an adaptation of Gogol for the Google era called Dead SULs, but when not working spends far, far too much time on Twitter. She currently lives in Cambridge, MA.

In 2009, we spent more than 240 hours a month bringing you Brain Pickings. That’s over 2,880 hours for the year, over which we could’ve seen 29 feature-length films, listened to 72 music albums or taken 960 bathroom visits. If you found any joy and inspiration here this year, please consider supporting us with a modest donation — it lets us know we’re doing something right.

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The Interpretation

Combining microbiology, minimalist music, and motion graphics, or how you can own original art for less than the price of a movie ticket.

No longer the sole domain of the leisured classes, art collecting is open to broad audiences like never before. Over the last few years, online marketplaces — like 20×200 and Supermarket — have made works on paper readily accessible.

Somehow, though, this great democratization of patronage seems to have skipped over digital art as a medium for popular purchase. We find this kind of amusing, given that new media creations are the consummate works of art for the age of digitized reproduction. It’s precisely creations made for screens that best lend themselves to mass duplication and distribution.

(Perhaps we consider computers too utilitarian a medium for something as utopian as art; or, more likely, no online dealer has yet established itself as the go-to purveyor. If anyone wants to partner up for that project, we’re game…)

One example of such easily collected work is The Interpretation, a 36-minute DVD that was an official selection of the DOTMOV Film Festival, The Graphic Design Festival, and TodaysArt Digital Art Festival. Created by Michael Paul Young and Michael Cina, co-founders of the Minneapolis-based design firm YouWorkForThem, The Interpretation takes you on an abstract tour through a verdant environment composed entirely of vectors. Green, blue, and brown shapes hint at both seascapes and plant forms. Swirling planes of color take on the dimensions of tornadoes and turbines, turning infinitely around some locus that remains forever hidden.

A soundtrack composed by Cina in collaboration with recording label Ghostly International combines barking dogs, bird chirps, and blowing wind, manipulated from online samples and mashed up into an enigmatic, textured minimalism.

As with an actual forest, we find The Interpretation calming and foreboding in equal measure; it’s almost as though our remove from nature is now so vast, even its virtual incarnation can feel overwhelming. (For more superb works for screen, check out Young’s Vimeo page and iPhone art app, Buamai.)

Young created the work’s visuals first, initially as a commission for the OFFF digital art festival. Originally intended to be installed in a small room with monitors covering the walls, The Interpretation would create an ambient world for contemplation. What’s so cool about the work, though — and the reason we hope new media art finds a larger following — is that you can experience it in a range of settings. Unlike media that can only be in one place at a time, digital work is often created for infinite destinations.

So even if you’re reading this at work, you can dim the lights, press play, and take in an interpretation of nature, rendered by code.

Kirstin Butler has a Bachelor’s in art & architectural history and a Master’s in public policy from Harvard University. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn as a freelance editor and researcher, where she also spends way too much time on Twitter. For more of her thoughts, check out her videoblog.

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Top 10 Contemporary Cross-Disciplinary Conferences

Ideas in real life, or how to increase the statistical probability of finding a clown, Malcolm Gladwell, and a rocket scientist in the same room.

It’s no secret that we’re huge TED fans here at Brain Pickings, but we also follow other conferences with a great deal of interest — ambitious alternative events determined to make oft-repeated phrases like “design thinking” and “interdisciplinary innovation” mean something. These expansive — but not prohibitively expensive — experiences also aim to create communities that live beyond the initial flurry of inspiration. And while we certainly don’t believe the world needs gratuitous gatherings of extraordinary people doing extraordinary things, we do believe in incubating ideas and connecting inspired changemakers.

So here’s a list of the top-10 non-TED alternative live conferences — and we use the term loosely — bound to make your brain sparkle.

99%

Named after Thomas Edison’s dictum, “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% Perspiration,” the 99% conference has a unique raison d’être: “making ideas happen.” In a twist to traditional conference talks, the speakers are asked to share the stories behind the execution of their great ideas, rather than the ideas themselves. (And with a brand-name lineup featuring Michael Beirut and Seth Godin, attendees were already familiar with the speakers’ main ideas anyway.)

Produced by the creativity consultancy Behance, the inaugural 99% conference took place in New York in April of this year; next year’s is already on tap for April 15-16, 2010.

BARCAMP

Inspired by Tim O’Reilly’s famous invite-only hacker summit, Foo Camp, BarCamp borrowed from the hacker slang foobar to create a set of guidelines for an alternative, open-to-all, ad-hoc event around a common topic or theme that anyone can host anywhere. (These user-generated experiences are also sometimes called unconferences or non-conferences, after legendary eccentric curator Hans Ulrich Obrist‘s experimental non-conference in Jülich, Germany, in the 90’s.)

A self-organizing community of diverse interests, BarCamp participants are also its presenters. Attendees spend the first part of each event brainstorming and voting for session subjects, and can then choose among the various breakout groups. As you might imagine, the quality of a BarCamp can vary considerably depending on who’s present — we’ve had mixed experiences, accordingly. But as the saying goes, you get what you pay for; and BarCamps are typically free.

DO LECTURES

As with the 99%, the Do Lectures have the proactive premise “that the Doers of the world can inspire the rest of us to go Do something.” Fewer than 100 attendees, speakers, and staff gather in west Wales under a tent for a weekend of cross-disciplinary inspiration. Speakers at this year’s second-annual Do session included mountaineer Paul Deegan and Tony Davidson, Creative Director of ad agency Wieden+Kennedy.

The Do Lectures were started by David and Clare Hieatt, founders of the activewear brand Howie’s.

THE FEAST

Produced by the irrepressible duo behind All Day Buffet (Jerri Chou and Mike Karnjanaprakorn, who also put on the first 99% conference), The Feast is a two-day affair that had its first run in New York this year as well.

With the tagline “feast on good,” the focus here is social enterprise: self-sustaining, next-generation initiatives with nothing less than world-changing intentions. Talks from inspiring models such as charity: water and New Orleans’s 9th Ward Field of Dreams made for an amazing lineup, and everything from fifteen-minute breaks to flatware is carefully curated by the conference organizers. (Okay, perhaps we’re a little biased, having attended the first Feast as a fellow.) Bias notwithstanding, though, All Day Buffet’s thoughtful stewardship of this startup conference makes it a must-follow event.

GEL

An acronym for “Good Experience Live,” GEL is a twice-yearly conference in New York, focused — as its name suggests — on the human experience in all arenas. The main event takes place in April and features speakers from business, design, technology, and other service-driven disciplines (so basically anything). GEL Health focuses on improving the patient experience and is held in October. Entering its seventh year, GEL was founded by Bit Literacy author and user-experience consultant Mark Hurst.

The next GEL is scheduled for April 29-30, 2010; in the meantime you can check out clips from past GELs here.

IGNITE

Started in Seattle in 2006, Ignite talks hacked Pecha Kucha’s 20×20 format (below) for a Google generation’s attention spans. Speakers have five minutes and 20 slides (which automatically rotate every 15 seconds) with which to present anything from cheesemaking to conservation. In addition to these nano-talks, participants also spend part of any Ignite event making — usually coding or moding something to be judged in a subsequent contest. Founders Brady Forrest and Bre Pettis have roots in online networks (O’Reilly Media and Etsy.com, respectively), and correspondingly, Ignite events are openly geeky affairs. Since that inaugural event Ignite has spread to cities around the world, with strongholds in New York, Helsinki, Paris, and Portland.

You can view more talks at Ignite’s YouTube channel, including Scott Berkun’s now canonical “Why and How to Give an Ignite Talk.”

PALOMAR5

A global group of 30 people under age 30 just completed six weeks at this innovation camp in Berlin, forming Palomar5’s first graduating class. Six young entrepreneurs founded the group and formulated the question posed to these lucky souls: “How will we work in the future?”

The residency itself then became a kind of living laboratory for Palomar5’s premise. (In a great nod to the industrial-era fabrik that served as backdrop, participants were given overalls to wear for their first weekend, “to initiate a kind of reset-mode.” From the look of Palomar5’s Flickr sets, the attendees may have enjoyed a Hefeweiss or two on the former beer factory site as well.) Following weeks of envisioning, workshop-ing, and prototyping ideas, the camp culminated in a festival and livestreamed summit (that included a talk by Brain Pickings favorite Aaron Koblin).

Palomar5 may be in hibernation mode now, but you can still connect with its community on Facebook and Twitter.

PECHAKUCHA

What started in 2003 in a Tokyo gallery as an event for designers has since spread to 260-plus cities, from A Coruña to Zürich. Pecha Kucha pioneered the 20-slides-in-20-seconds format, providing a built-in check for creatives who tend toward too much exposition. Beyond this constraint, however, the talks have been held in bars, churches, and swimming pools; equally diverse are Pecha Kucha speakers, fulfilling the founders’ wish that anyone, from upstart to well-established, might be able to present.

Check here to see if there’s a Pecha Kucha Night near you, and catch up on presentations past on their recently launched video portal.

PINC

Held in the Netherlands, the annual PINC conference typically features around 16 speakers and 500 guests.

Its acronym stands for People, Ideas, Nature, and Creativity, and the prevailing ethos — as articulated by PINC’s founder, publisher Peter van Lindonk — is “passion.” (Not for nothing did van Lindonk spent 15 years moonlighting as a ringmaster for Amsterdam’s World Christmas Circus.)

The eclectic program aims to recharge the brain’s batteries with “[a]n inspiring cascade of new ideas, great stories, and impressive visual presentations.” Next year’s PINC is scheduled for May 11-18, 2010, but you can watch videos from past years here.

TEDX

We would be remiss if we didn’t mention the fantastic success that is TEDx.

These independently curated, local talks have brought TED’s mission of “ideas that matter” to 350-plus places globally, and created their own rich cache of video for anyone to watch. TED may be the sine qua non of idea conferences, but these smaller stages are showcasing an exciting amount of big thinking.

We’re certain that we missed other great conferences and meeting models in this rundown, particularly non-English-language-based experiences, so do use the comments section to tip us off to your favorite alt-conferences.

Kirstin Butler is writing an adaptation of Gogol for the Google era called Dead SULs, but when not working spends far, far too much time on Twitter. She currently lives in Cambridge, MA.

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Super-Smart Learning

Why playing Oregon Trail is like learning basic Japanese, or how to beat the Ebbinghaus Curve.

For a scientifically inclined utopian, technology is the potential antidote to all of society’s ills. Techno-optimists believe every challenge, from cancer to cleanliness, has an applied-science solution. Most of us approach technology with significantly more skepticism, of course. But as 21st-century citizens, we’ve come to understand that our progressively more complex problems require more than machines alone.

As it turns out, though, simpler challenges—like, say, memorizing the names of world capitals—are in fact being better addressed by new technologies every day. So goes the story behind two learning programs, Smart.fm and SuperMemo, both garnering attention as we increasingly look to gadgets and gizmos to improve our lifestyles. (Call it the Wii Fit phenomenon.)

Smart.fm and SuperMemo aim, and claim, to help you memorize and retain knowledge in more efficient ways. Both products are based on a well-proven finding known as the Ebbinghaus, or forgetting, curve, first deduced by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus in 1885. The curve is an equation (, to be specific) that describes how our brains forget things over time.

Essentially, Ebbinghaus found that memory retention of newly acquired knowledge declines unless we consciously review that knowledge. Subsequent scientific studies (mostly in the 1930s and late 1960s) revealed even more about the nature of memory and learning: If we review an item right before we’re about to forget it, immediately prior to our brains’ contact with the curve, we actually improve our ability to retain that item in memory. The way to ensure remembrance, then, is to increase the length of time between these information reviews, a technique otherwise known as spaced repetition.

When computers became more common in the 1980s, researchers began to experiment with algorithms for automating the spacing of repeated knowledge over time.

Fast forward to the future and the tantalizing promises of technology for better living. Just as exercise has its own digital assistant, so too can learning. If all it takes to remember something is a well-timed reminder, then why not leave your learning to a robot? And now not only can we automate such simple processes, we can make them fit in the palm of a hand. Smart.fm‘s newly released iPhone app promises to do just that — make learning a portable experience — as illustrated in a cheeky short its creators made to highlight the app’s features and functionality.

The iPhone app is based on Smart.fm‘s online-learning platform, which itself grew out of an adaptive-learning system called iKnow. Cerego, a Japanese venture-backed think tank, created all of the products and had already popularized iKnow’s use in Japan before introducing an English-language version. We were fascinated to see how this earlier incarnation of Smart.fm developed into its intuitive, present-day user experience, a process satisfyingly documented as a case study by the über-smart design firm Adaptive Path, which partnered with Cerego on these multiple orders of translation.

Where Smart.fm is sexy and supple in design, SuperMemo is, well, not. (Consider it the Craig’s List of online learning.) What it does have, however, is a storied pedigree documented by Wired and other ahead-of-the-curve pubs (pun unfortunately intended). SuperMemo‘s creator, Piotr Wozniak, is its ultimate evangelist because he’s also its Ur-user — he created the platform for his personal use. Wozniak developed the software behind SuperMemo in the mid-1980s without prior knowledge of Ebbinghaus’s repetitive trials. Its user interface seems like it’s changed little since Wozniak wrote his first programs, but perhaps this is SuperMemo‘s charm. In fact, a kind of cottage industry of both white-label versions and ad-hoc, pirated programs sprang up as soon as the Internet allowed for easy file sharing.

What Smart.fm hides under the hood, however, SuperMemo makes accessible. All of the statistical breakdowns driving the program’s prompts are available for your perusal, should you get excited by indices and intervals. (No need to be shy–we’re very sympathetic to such symptoms here at Brain Pickings.) For the person who wants to see and directly manipulate a product’s inner workings, SuperMemo allows for much more hands-on interaction than the plug-and-play approach designed by Adaptive Path. What both Smart.fm and SuperMemo share is a pliability in their ultimate purposes. You can use preprogrammed language-learning modules, but you can also personalize each by adding your own information for spaced repetition.

So while neither Smart.fm nor SuperMemo can cure the common cold, consider exploring technologically augmented learning for your next mental exercise–like that taxonomy of Tolkein characters you’ve been meaning to commit to memory.

Kirstin Butler is writing an adaptation of Gogol for the Google era called Dead SULs, but when not working spends far, far too much time on Twitter. She currently lives in Cambridge, MA.

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