Networked Urbanism
design thinking initiatives for a better urban life
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funeral industry
MYPS is personalized cloud to ground cartography that reshapes both how we compose our farewells and how we receive the farewells of others.
A P.S. is an afterthought – an easily appended message that crosses our mind after we think we have said all we mean to say. Yet the postscript also contains our final words, which are actually quite powerful. When combined with the power of place in the development of memories, these afterthoughts can create meaningful journeys for our loved ones to revisit after we are gone.
MYPS uses the GPS capabilities of mobile devices in combination with familiar media sharing formats to facilitate the process of recording our shared memories so our loved ones may literally revisit them after our passing.
The following video is a preview of my final review “experience”. It shows how MYPS could tie together three generations of memories. When my Mom came to see me in Boston, we visited the places my grandpa remembered from his own time living here during World War II. After her passing, I will be able to revisit our route to see the memories she left behind.
I was invited to participate in a networking event by Ruth Faas, my main contact in Boston’s death-care industry, on December 8th in Arlington, MA. Attendees included board members of both the Eastern and Western Massachusetts Funeral Consumer’s Alliances, Grief Therapists, Artists, Funeral Celebrants and Funeral Directors. Here’s what they had to say about MYPS…
When using MYPS, the authographer (author + cartographer) links each PS they upload to a “Journey”, which will be compiled into a map with the geotagged messages and sent to the listed recipients. The preferences for each journey are set up by the authographer when the journey is initiated, including the contact information for the recipients and the intended length of the journey. The lifelong journey cannot be closed until the entire account is deactivated; the planned journeys have established dates when they will close, and the unplanned journeys can be closed manually at any time. Your companions are the journeys fellow authographers have sent to you.
Deactivation and recipient contact information are controlled and updated, respectively, through periodic emails. An e-prompt will ask you once every 3 months to update your contact information, your recipients’ contact information, and to confirm your continued use. If the authographer does not respond to 3 successive prompts, the entire account will automatically deactivate. This can be disabled, temporarily, if the authographer does not plan on having e-mail or internet access for an extended period of time.
Each PS can be a note, a photo, a video, a recording, a sketch or a placeholder, which will allow you to revisit the PS and add a message later off-site, or simply remain as a “place” on the map.
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The film I will be presenting, Dive! Living Off America’s Waste, is actually about food waste in the US, as documented by an LA dumpster diver. The presentation slides below pull out the shocking statistics regarding the enormous waste of our food industry. The video relates to my larger research regarding the funeral industry in Massachusetts in that the narrator attempts to enact change at various points in the process from production to consumption to waste. My current efforts to map the network of postmortem processes in Massachusetts follows a similar logic – explore a variety of scales and points in the network to see where the most effective place for intervention is.
As a follow up I will present The American Way of Death, by Jessica Mitford. Written in 1963, this book is an expose of the inherent corruption in the funeral industry at that time. Many of the groups I am currently networking with, including the Funeral Consumer’s Alliance and Mourning Dove Studios, were established in reaction to Mitford’s research. She outlines with statistics, personal investigation and anecdotes the process by which funeral directors take advantage of grieving families to maximize profits. Mitford explains how funeral homes have formed monopolies against change by establishing relationships with casket manufacturers and cemeteries that guarantee the industry will work together to ensure their own financial success at the cost of the average consumer. Now consumer alliances have formed in many states to help people navigate the industry and protect their rights by providing information on burial laws and consumer friendly funeral homes. These organizations are currently leading the way towards more environmentally friendly burial options as well.
Dive! & The American Way of Death