Paul Castellana

Client: West Laurel Hill Cemetery

Teammates: Nas Dombrowski, Echo Wan

PROBLEM STATEMENT

By 2030, cremation is expected to account for 80% of final dispositions, and fewer and fewer people are turning to the cemetery as a place to memorialize their loved ones or themselves.

How might we rethink the memorialization products and services that West Laurel Hill can offer to better serve the evolving needs of the community?

Research

We began our research by mapping out the stakeholders involved in the cemetery and memorialization community and process. We quickly narrowed our focus on the customer side of experience, interviewing people of different ages and backgrounds about their experiences with memorializing loved ones, as well as their thoughts on memorializing themselves. Based on our interviews, we developed the personas of Sam and Alex, a married couple with two young children, and created an emotional journey map that tracks the family’s visit to the cemetery to pay their respects to loved ones passed.

Those we spoke to described an inability to connect with the types of memorials on offer, leading to a lack of fulfillment and proper engagement for both children and adults. Consequently an experience that would ideally strengthen family bonds through shared remembrance and retrospection, instead leaves the family wanting. This lack of fulfillment and emotional toll compounds with each attempt for the family to pay respect to their loved ones, and the likelihood of return to the cemetery, or for the family members to use the cemetery for their own future memorializations gets progressively lower.

The example family journey map is part of the breakdown of a larger cultural feedback loop. While the specifics rituals of course vary across cultures and time, for most of human history, when a loved one passed away, how the funeral and memorial were handled and ways in which the family would subsequently pay respect to the deceased were determined by the religious doctrines to which they subscribed, and the particular family traditions that accompanied them. Our research and interviews indicated that this cycle was breaking down because of the pain points listed, explaining why new generations are searching for alternative means of memorialization.

We synthesized our research into the insights below, and in combination with the three pillars of West Laurel Hill - Eternal Rest, Recreation, and Civic Value - developed a set of criteria to guide our design.

Ideation and Testing

With our design criteria in mind, we developed a number of possible ideas to address the problem of memorialization in the 21st century. Based on discussions with our stakeholders, we zeroed in on an interactive sculpture garden as having the greatest potential in the context of West Laurel Hill, and explored two possible manifestations of this concept: the use of light prisms to create patterns of rainbow light through retraction, and a technique of cutting grooves and channels into natural stone that gives it the ability to create a subtle musical sounds when rubbed with another stone.

To test our ideas, we created social media profiles for a fake design studio called The Institute of Advanced Memorials. We promoted posts that included renderings and explanations of each design, and found that the Sounding Stones received a more favorable response. However, through the reactions to these posts, we learned that people still read them as headstones intended to mark the disposition of remains, which led us to pivot the idea to have the Sounding Stones be the focal points of a collective memorial garden, rather than being the memorials themselves.

Solution

The Sound Stone Garden reimagines what the cemetery can be, and consequently the experiences people have within it and the role it plays within the community. Instead purchasing an individual marker as a way to memorialize, people are given the opportunity to donate to a collective garden that holds the memories of loved ones lost. The Sounding Stone sculptures serve to tie the space together by creating a ritualized experience that speaks to both young and old. It has an aesthetic language that matches that of the existing cemetery, and is respectful despite bringing a sense of play into an otherwise sobering atmosphere. Ultimately, rather than prompting the mourning of loss, the garden celebrates the lives that were lived.