We Can't Control Death, but We Can Redesign the Experience of It

The creative director of IDEO, one of the world's largest design consultancies, has launched an ambitious movement that concerns everyone.

Paul Bennett, 51, is happy to talk about death. In fact, he has spent more than a year talking about it with all kinds of people, and he wants to turn "redesigning death" into something that serves every American baby boomer, and many more people around the world: a business.

The ambition suits his job. Paul is creative director of IDEO, one of the largest design consultancies in the world. Design has never produced big companies. By unconfirmed figures, IDEO had 600 employees worldwide in 2014 and annual revenue of about US$130 million; McKinsey, which also sells consulting to companies, had 17,000 employees and US$7 billion in revenue the same year. Yet IDEO still holds sway over many famous corporations: Bank of America, General Electric, Apple, Google... It also runs a course at Stanford University, where founder David Kelley teaches students from different disciplines the value of design.

IDEO makes money not only by answering clients' requests but also by turning its own ideas into business opportunities. It is hard to get Paul to say in plain words what "being a creative director at IDEO" involves. But according to Jon Mooallem, a writer for California Sunday, when Paul walks into a room full of colleagues, many of them strain to show off their most creative side, hoping to impress him.

IDEO and Paul invited Mooallem to spend more than a year documenting Paul's thinking and work on "redesigning death." His article describes the whole process in detail, and shows how Paul turned an idea into a project that brings many people together.

The idea began with the death of Paul's father, or more precisely with something his father did as he lay dying. Years later, Paul called it "a gift." His father, who had bone cancer, told Paul not to rush to see him one last time, even though his son promised to take the fastest flight he could. "He was holding on to his last bit of dignity, and in a way he was also controlling the experience of (dying)."

Paul soon began collecting more of the unspeakable things about death. Death itself is unpredictable and unimaginable for almost everyone, but everything around it is not: hospitals, hospice care, the manner and tone in which doctors break the news to families, the ways we mourn, funerals, how we express grief and overwhelming emotion when we remember the dead. In the internet age, it even includes what to do with a person's digital legacy, including the design of online accounts and blogs.

For IDEO and Paul, all of this is opportunity. "Opportunity" may sound mercenary, but for a design firm, death is not much different from anything else that can be redesigned. The one tricky part is that death covers so much ground that Paul has his colleagues hunt for clues everywhere: in culture, in experiences, in startups.

The actual work began with an app called After I Go. That is very Silicon Valley, and IDEO is headquartered in Silicon Valley and made its name there.

The app came from a startup founded by another Paul, Paul Gaffney, who designed it the way he saw fit: before they died, people could use it to record wills or other instructions, Social Security numbers, bank passwords and the like. It flopped, because it essentially told people: hey, you're about to die, so get your affairs in order. When Gaffney finally realized this, he hired IDEO and Paul to fix it.

After many rounds of thinking by many people, Paul gave After I Go a new role, built on a question: what if the product conveyed not sadness but comfort?

With After I Go, people can leave a letter for those they love (ideally in a handwriting font). It is a little like a message, but more like a wish for the living, one that can bring comfort. The rest of the work is refining the whole process; put simply, making the app, built around "providing comfort," easier to use and more popular.

Paul is trying to do much more than this app. He wants to push other people, his colleagues as well as potential clients, to think about how the experience of death could be improved. We talked with him about this work, and about what death means to him personally.

Q = QDaily

P = Paul Bennett

Q: The article spends a lot of space on your plans to change death. What exactly do you want to do to make that happen?

P: There are many angles on a subject like death. It's like designing each small piece of a jigsaw puzzle. No single answer will make death less frightening. Instead there are many things to do and many opportunities: talking with children, talking with people who have lost family and friends, people who are dying, people who take their own lives, funerals, hospitals... But if I had to choose just one mission from all of these, it would be to make death feel like a reflection of life.

BJ Miller (an IDEO client who provides hospice care) put it well: "A hospital is not a place to die. A hospital is a place to treat illness, and those are very different things." Imagine that your last experience of this world is white sheets and the smell of anesthetic and disinfectant. What a terrible way to leave the world.

So I learned a lot from my experience at one hospital. One thing they do strikes me as nothing short of genius: they bake cookies every day. Even if the patients can't eat them, they bake them anyway, because the smell reminds them of life. At first I mocked this for a long time. But recently, about six months ago, I was in hospital myself in Singapore with kidney stones. I smelled baking bread there too and thought, "Huh, what's going on?" So I went looking around, and eventually found a bakery in the dining area. I went up to a woman working there and asked, "Are you baking bread here?" She said, "Yes. It's good for patients to smell fresh bread, because it reminds them they're still alive."

Q: That reminds me that Nanjing Drum Tower Hospital has a Starbucks, where people might catch the smell of coffee.

P: Yes, like that. So my greatest hope is to make death feel like a reflection of our lives. That hospital holds many rituals. My favorite is this: after someone dies, they ask the funeral home staff to come an hour late to take the body away, so there is an hour. They carry the body out to the garden, everyone gathers around it, they drink a small glass of wine, and they pick flowers from the garden and lay them on the body. The hospital also encourages people to touch the body before it is taken away. Mourning that begins like this starts from a very positive place, so in the end people don't feel utterly lost, and there are moments like baking cookies, baking bread, laying flowers.

Q: That's interesting. People sometimes hold rituals to say goodbye to the dead that seem incomprehensible to others.

P: I agree. A volunteer at BJ's once told us about a family who had lost a member, a man who loved ice cream. His family sat down in the room and asked, "What do you want to do?" A child said, "I want ice cream." So they all sat around the body eating ice cream. It's a wonderful story, because they were spending that time remembering the life of the man who had died. Rituals and small details like these can make it feel very emotional and personal.

Q: You're a designer. Is "redesigning death" a very big ambition?

P: Yes, because we are up against two thousand years of orthodox ritual. I also feel that I'm Asian; I grew up in Singapore. I remember going to a funeral with my parents, and they had to go to a funeral shop to buy paper money to burn. Don't assume the Western funeral is the only kind. In Vietnam they cremate, Tibetans have sky burials, in India there are water burials... I have another good story. A few weeks ago I went to New Zealand and saw a Maori funeral, a very special one. When someone in a family is about to die, they gather around him and touch his body. If you are about to go, your four sons sleep right beside you, your grandchildren sleep next to them, and more distant relatives sleep next to the grandchildren. One day someone was close to death, and when we went to see him we found 63 people sleeping around him. They believe this keeps your spirit from floating upward as you go, because they are holding it in place. The whole room was covered with mattresses so people could sleep there. It was an extraordinary experience.

Q: So what can you change?

P: I don't know, but the hardest part is already happening. People come and ask me questions, and I think that is the change. They ask me: "Is this all there is? Is this enough? Do I have to accept this?" I think what we can do is, first, talk; second, gather evidence; and third, which we are about to do, start designing, because I worry that the conversation will stay theoretical. We will also bring people from around the world into the discussion. We want to see what everyone thinks.

Q: Where do you plan to start?

P: To begin with, we want to launch a creative challenge. For example, we would persuade an American company to fund a challenge that calls on people to propose models of end-of-life care.

Q: Are there any other concrete steps?

P: The first step is to start the conversation. Everyone has a story and wants to tell it, so the first thing I want to do is give people a place to tell theirs. Second, I want to hear people's ideas, because they have plenty: making an app that helps me plan my life, how to deal with grief, what the hospital rooms of the future will look like, and finding more evidence about that man in Wisconsin, because he built many different models. As for the third step, we don't have an answer yet... There is no answer to death. If there were, people would have found it thousands of years ago.

Q: Forgive me for asking, but you are 51. Is there an element of midlife crisis in your thinking about death?

P: Partly, yes. I turned 50 last year, and my partner is 15 years older than I am, so in a sense, yes. But I'm not afraid of death. I don't want to transcend it. I'm even excited by it, and excited by what we're doing.

Our culture has reached a point where people say, "I don't understand why the way we handle dying, such an important stage of life, is so old-fashioned. Can't we try something new?" Everyone is questioning other things: how we should live, where we should live, who we are, whether we have the power to push for change. So why can't we change this as well?

Q: I'd also like to raise another kind of death, a spiritual one: how do you keep thinking like a young person, with an active, risk-taking attitude? Many people have lost that ability.

P: Yes. One thing that defines my parents is that they traveled all their lives and were very positive about what they did. My mother is 87, but she still refuses to admit she's old. She thinks the 71-year-old woman next door is old because she only eats a sandwich for dinner. My mother says, "I don't want to be like that old lady next door, eating a sandwich for dinner. Only old people do that." My mother has a lot of fight in her. She has always fought aging, and so did my father. So losing curiosity and the ability to feel is also a kind of death; I completely agree. Apathy and anger are kinds of death too: physical, cultural, psychological death, and so on. We want to start that discussion as well.

Q: As you explore the world, what interests you most?

P: What we were just talking about: how to enter areas that are hard to control, with an optimistic attitude, and make change there, whether the area is death or religion, loneliness or mental health. Loneliness is another subject that interests me a great deal. To me, loneliness is the most frightening human affliction. So I find the "void" an interesting place. Death is a void, for example, and so is religion.

Q: People may define "loneliness" in very different ways, but their definitions of "death" are fairly consistent.

P: Yes. We often talk about epidemics, such as bird flu and AIDS, but we never talk about the epidemic of loneliness. Yet I think it is the most common affliction and the one with the greatest impact. In this age of advanced communications, people usually tell themselves, "I'm not lonely." In fact I often feel lonely, even though I have a partner.

Q: Do you think smart devices can help ease loneliness? Many people, and many startups, are trying to solve that problem.

P: Let me give you an example first: I have diabetes. Ten years ago I had no idea how to control it. Ten years later, technology lets me understand and manage it completely, and I feel my body and the technology are like partners. But that hasn't changed how I feel about having diabetes. I still hate it, and I still feel fragile, like a patient. Technology has made me better informed about my condition, but it hasn't changed my identity as a patient. So I think that however advanced technology and information become, we still need experience; we need both. Technology can't replace experience. That's also why, when someone came to me wanting to make an app about death, I turned him down on the spot: no app can make death go away. It might help a tiny bit, but in the end, after you die, when I remember you, I won't want to look at an app on my phone.

Q: But many people really do believe technology can change everything.

P: True, and I can't dismiss their view. Technology does change our environment. You can watch a TED talk in person, for example, or download it online. Strangely enough, I went to see Beyoncé and Jay-Z in concert, and it felt a little like an electric shock, even a little like religion. It was completely different from watching on a computer. So I don't think anything needs to change; people need both.

Image credit: Amy Friend, California Sunday