Since my professional topic of exploration focuses on the silence around discussions of death in our culture, I created several different visualizations of the topic to better understand the issue.
Before starting these, I did some reading about how death became such a taboo subject in western cultures, which eventually lead me down the interesting path toward ‘terror management theory’ and ‘mortality salience.’ This is a super interesting field of thought (supported by many kinds of scientific research) that says our natural instinct for self-preservation and the reality of our death create psychological conflict in us, which produces fear. We manage this fear by embracing cultural values or systems that determine what is meaningful in life—things that bolster our sense of country, lineage, species (such as national identity, posterity, religion, and superiority over animals). These value-giving aspects of identity are the foundations of self-esteem, and this self-esteem bolsters us against death anxieties (because we can feel strong as an individual, even if we are going to die one day).
It turns out that if we are made conscious of our mortality (mortality salience), we then become worldview-defensive, showing a stronger preference for people who support these views and a stronger dislike for any challenge to our worldview. This naturally arises from the fact that as we are faced with the reality of our death, even subconsciously, we turn to these self-esteem building values as a source of comfort. In fact, if we are told an activity that gives us self-esteem (such as smoking, for sun-tanning) increases our risk of death, we will reject this information and show an even stronger positive view of this activity than before. This doubling-down is necessary to protect us from the anxiety caused by mortality salience.
This area of research indicates that it may be true (not all studies conducted confirm this hypothesis) that suppressing thoughts of death causes in general (as compared with always having death close to the consciousness) will lead to more thoughts of death, and greater anxiety, from mortality salience. If true, it follows that being open about death and making it an everyday part of life would reduce the anxiety it causes, and decrease our need for a worldview-defensive reaction.
Cool, right?! This field gives some new insight into why a cultural anxiety around death is a negative thing. After discovering all that, I worked through several versions of a conceptual mapping of the topic of death, until I ended up with this:
While distilling that complicated web of relationships, I also created this tree diagram that explores why this topic even matters. As you can see, the ‘leaves’ at the end of the branches all pretty much end in pain, societal harm, or perpetuating the cycle of fearing death:
Additionally, I made an Ishikawa (root) diagram to explore the topic from a different angle: why did this happen? The cycle perpetuates easily, like many fear-based cycles, but how did we get here in the first place from the Victorian-era ‘obsession’ (compared to now, anyway) with death? This will give you a few answers on the topic:
These visualizations are useful in providing both forward- and backward-thinking contexts of the topic, showing the many areas of life that relate to the subject of our death, and explaining why we should care at all.
Foundations of Interaction Design 