The Future Cemetery by John Troyer from uk

In April 2012, the Future Cemetery opened its central design hub in Bristol, England’s 175-year-old Arnos Vale Cemetery. The project is a three-way collaboration between the University of Bath's Centre for Death and Society, Calling the Shots media in Bristol, and Arnos Vale Cemetery Trust.

The Future Cemetery partnership came together to pursue a question related to both the past and future of deathcare: What can 21st century cemeteries become?

From the start, the Future Cemetery's core design ethos has been: We all know that death is in the future. We just want to make the future more visible.

In order to make death more visible for the general public, the Future Cemetery works with designers, multi-media artists, theatre performers, creative technologists, computer programmers, and app creators to transform Arnos Vale into an open source, end-of-life discussion and technology platform.

We specialize in prototyping creative spaces of death for all cemeteries by using Arnos Vale as a Testing Ground, which allows us to experiment on applications such as Augmented Reality memorials, soundscape installations, and NFC code App tours.

The images and videos that we have submitted demonstrate the different deathcare technologies developed by the Future Cemetery team to reimagine the experience of death.

The Future Cemetery project also addresses an important, longer-term subject: how technology continues to alter human perceptions of death, dying, and the dead body. We took the legacy of older deathcare technologies, such as 19th century postmortem photography, and developed a new interactive platform that uses a narrative driven technological format.
Stories drive Future Cemetery technologies and not the other way around.

One of our key design tactics focuses on storylines and discussions about death that engage audiences with end-of-life questions. Future Cemetery designed spaces ask people, for example, if their next-of-kin know what kind of funeral they want or if they could write a six-word epitaph about their life. In our field-testing and trial runs, we found that audiences enjoyed the interactive elements but really appreciated the opportunity to think about and discuss the end-of-life.

There's a myth that many people repeat: it's taboo to discuss death. The exact opposite is true--we humans discuss death and dying all the time. What we don't always discuss is our own personal death.

The Future Cemetery’s deathcare led designs creatively augment the physical space of Arnos Vale Cemetery into a technological Testing Ground that makes death more visible in 21st century cemeteries and encourages visitors to contemplate their own human mortality.

Future Cemetery website: http://futurecemetery.com

Twitter: @FutureCemetery

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thefuturecemetery

Future Cemetery project blog and Documentary Video:
http://www.react-hub.org.uk/heritagesandbox/projects/2012/the-future-cemetery/

Calling the Shots Future Cemetery Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mr3DE1iqOmk