Topic: Euthanasia - KISD Cologne
Work: Design and Concept
Location: Cologne
Date: 2021
Collaboration: Huiling Wang, David Wiesner, Alexander Griech
Details:
This was a uni project covering the difficult and controversial topic of Euthanasia. The task was to research about existing platforms and organizations providing support, or euthansia as a service itself, and re-design them.
After benchmarking multiple different websites that offer or discuss assisted suicide, we decided to also check for organizations opposing said idea. At the end of our benchmark we figured out many design elements, visual language and also wording choices and how they relate (or don’t relate) to the topic. Some of the websites were hard to compare as different amounts of funding could be assumed for the various organizations—the one with more funding obviously being able to present their position in a visually more pleasing way.
It was emotionally for all a very difficult project, which required lots of discussions, care and gentleness. Especially the thought of promoting assited suicide felt wrong to us, but it also felt inadequate to position ourselves against this, as we thought that ending ones life is something that we don’t have the right to judge. Therefore, we leaned towards showing various different positions instead of focussing on one, and rather creating a platfrom that informs, and inspires in a way to look at the topic from multiple lenses. The outome was an online magazine. We envisioned it can be used to cover different difficult and controversial topics, in several issues.
We had different ideas like a website that guides you through questions, one that would be like a hub, from where you can navigate to different views, a sort of benchmark that would show how the visual language changes depending on the position taken. Further, we felt that the assisted suicide only focussed on older people, or those that are terminally ill, while our perception was that suicide in general—especially among compareably younger people—was treated as something that needs to be prevented. With this our target group became impossibly large. We tried to conceptualize our approach in a number of variations and asked for in-class feedback.
But still the target group and perspective the magazine should take was unclear. Since we wanted to include more perspective than just those of people planning or considering (assisted sucicide)—like family members, doctors and assistants—we had trouble on how to fit them into categories. In order to get a better grasp on our final product we thought of articles that our magazine would cover. We invented a number of articles and wrote short teaser texts that shed light on what the article can entail. In the end we came up with the idea of sections: Monologue, Dialogue and Discourse. These would allow us to show opposing positions in the same category but still have distinct categories from each other.
Work: Design and Concept
Location: Cologne
Date: 2021
Collaboration: Huiling Wang, David Wiesner, Alexander Griech
Details:
This was a uni project covering the difficult and controversial topic of Euthanasia. The task was to research about existing platforms and organizations providing support, or euthansia as a service itself, and re-design them.
After benchmarking multiple different websites that offer or discuss assisted suicide, we decided to also check for organizations opposing said idea. At the end of our benchmark we figured out many design elements, visual language and also wording choices and how they relate (or don’t relate) to the topic. Some of the websites were hard to compare as different amounts of funding could be assumed for the various organizations—the one with more funding obviously being able to present their position in a visually more pleasing way.
It was emotionally for all a very difficult project, which required lots of discussions, care and gentleness. Especially the thought of promoting assited suicide felt wrong to us, but it also felt inadequate to position ourselves against this, as we thought that ending ones life is something that we don’t have the right to judge. Therefore, we leaned towards showing various different positions instead of focussing on one, and rather creating a platfrom that informs, and inspires in a way to look at the topic from multiple lenses. The outome was an online magazine. We envisioned it can be used to cover different difficult and controversial topics, in several issues.
We had different ideas like a website that guides you through questions, one that would be like a hub, from where you can navigate to different views, a sort of benchmark that would show how the visual language changes depending on the position taken. Further, we felt that the assisted suicide only focussed on older people, or those that are terminally ill, while our perception was that suicide in general—especially among compareably younger people—was treated as something that needs to be prevented. With this our target group became impossibly large. We tried to conceptualize our approach in a number of variations and asked for in-class feedback.
But still the target group and perspective the magazine should take was unclear. Since we wanted to include more perspective than just those of people planning or considering (assisted sucicide)—like family members, doctors and assistants—we had trouble on how to fit them into categories. In order to get a better grasp on our final product we thought of articles that our magazine would cover. We invented a number of articles and wrote short teaser texts that shed light on what the article can entail. In the end we came up with the idea of sections: Monologue, Dialogue and Discourse. These would allow us to show opposing positions in the same category but still have distinct categories from each other.