#021 Ivor Williams [Design & Death]

Welcome to episode 021! You can join my mailing list to stay in loop about Sizzle Episodes and to receive [semi regular] emails about using psychology in your life:  https://www.drjotaylor.com/my-mailing-list

In this episode I am joined by Ivor Williams, a designer and Lead for End-of-Life Care at the Helix Centre, a part of the Institute of Global Health Innovation (Imperial). His work focuses on thinking about how we can live, die and grieve better. During the episode we cover a range of topics, including:

- The place of design within medicine and death
- Dying and the medical profession
- Archetypes, power and dying
- The move from the priest to the medical profession
- The transition between the specialist to the lay person, supporting people in dying
- The way the pandemic has devolved responsibility for mediating death
- The need for someone to say "I've seen this before" with death
- The balance between distributing the role and keeping the experience needed, for helping people die.
- Designers as neutral participants, between the church and the doctor
- Doulas supporting with death (as well as birth)
- The gendered experience of birth and death
- People want different things when it comes to their death
- Death as a permanent end to an attachment
- At what point does the process of death start to focus on the living?
- "who is a good death for?"
- Drawing the distinction between avoidable deaths and deaths
- How can we decide when a death is "a failure?"
- Collective Grief: what can we do collectively?
- Planetary palliative care: do we need to accept things are ending in a civilisational level?
- Can suffering transform?
- Viewing Maslow's hierarchy of needs from the perspective of 'becoming part of a collective whole' and understanding your place in time
- How can we use our smartphones to grieve better?
- Cove App - a musical emotional journey
- "They had the best growth, the best health, the best pensions and now they want the best death. And our generation is responding by creating start ups" - Baby Boomers and the demand for 'death-tech'
- How the context of can shape whether it's perceived as 'a failure'

Find out more about Ivor:
http://ivorwilliams.info/about

Contact Ivor:
@ivorinfo (Twitter)