Also Known as Death

For my Type 4 class this past term we had to deal with taboos. We could chose any taboo that we want to design a campaign that consisted of: a triptych poster series, a media based component, and an environmental/product component. For my taboo I ended up picking Death. This project was pretty difficult initially to come up with the right direction for the campaign. Death is something that in western society we don't like to talk about. Our society wants everyone to be young, successful and healthy. It refuses to accept death, which is seen as a weakness. Death is one of the few things in this world that is truly universal. No matter your financial state, race, gender, religion, age, or sexual preference at one point in time you are going to die.

The funny thing is that our avoidance of talking about death is what ended up being the concept of my campaign. During my research I learned that there are more than 200 euphemisms for death. Also, that the euphemisms themselves were created to avoid actually saying death. After learning this I decided to focus my concept from 3 different perspectives: a pop culture look on death through euphemisms, a dictionary/academia definition of death, and actually contemplating what death is. I knew right away that I didn't want to deal with death from any specific religious point of view. Also, I wanted to use humor to soften the blow and not scare people.

For the triptych series, the CROAKED poster features pop culture's euphemisms for death, the DEMISE poster features the dictionary's words for death, and THE END poster features words taking an honest look at death. For my screen based component, I did a PSA to animate the message of the posters. My environmental campaign turned out to include numerous components. For the first part I decided to make a Death Kit that people could buy. The kit would include: a T-Shirt, buttons, stickers, and key chains. Each of these materials features euphemisms and other sayings that I created, like the Death Is... sayings. The second part of the environmental campaign would include Death Coopers. Death Coopers are black Mini Clubman Coopers that would drive around public sections of cities to get the message across. The Death Coopers have the euphemisms on one side and the message of Also Known as Death on the other side. Lastly, I transferred the posters to be environmental tombstones.