Overview
The Good Mourning Project (2021) is a platform for collective unburdening that explores our individual and collective relationship with grief. This project challenges users to engage critically with existing societal conventions around mourning, and their efficacy in addressing the reality of loss and the needs of grieving people.
User experience mapping, wireframing and lo-fi prototypes for this project were created using Figma. Any graphics were made in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. The Good Mourning Project is a web-based experience, and so was built using primarily HTML, CSS and Javascript.
The exercise interface and archive use Anime.js for transitions, React.js for interface design, Leaflet.js and Mapbox for location-based inputs, and Howler.js for 3D sound. User inputs are sent to and retrieved from a Firebase Realtime Database.
Context
The target audience for this project are people who have completed the conventional rituals associated with mourning, and yet feel that they have not really come to terms with their loss. I want to invite participation from those who feel that their grief is now a private responsibility.
Users complete a series of digital and analog exercises related to grief that were devised based on my research around mourning. The exercises relate to specific themes (eg. grief and place, grief and time, grief and language) and encourage users to engage with and express their needs and their ongoing experience with grief to their loved ones and community. Inputs are saved to a database and displayed in the Good Mourning archive at varying levels of abstraction.
Impact
My second stage of user testing revealed that some people may be hesitant to engage with the project because their responses, while anonymous, would be made public. This led me to add an option for users to save their inputs locally rather than publishing directly to the archive, though I still see the existence of the archive as a central element in encouraging grieving individuals to express their needs.
My hope, in adding this option, is that even just the process of writing our feelings and needs down, of saying them out loud, can help create a more open environment and make it easier to express those needs to our loved ones.