FEEDBACK FOR
GROUP 1

Group dynamics
- I feel that you worked on trust before starting to work together, this was something that is very powerful and useful to start with; great job.
- I just wonder, were there things that resulted difficult despite how you started. Like communication issues? Logistic issues?

Process
- It is not very clear how you conceptualised your project, you talked about death, and had this idea, and that was clear to me, but I kind of lost the process.
- Why a website? What was the academic relevance of this? What did you bases this on?
- I have the idea that you did a lot of things, and that is super cool and great, but from your presentation I didn’t get all links between things. What is the academic (or artistic, but I’m no artist, so I might missed it because of that) purpose and relevance.
- Why did Ege asked these questions? What is the idea behind the composition? What does this add to the others?
- This dine and wine exercise? What was your purpose? What effect did you want to have? What did you want to communicate? Up until now, I have been missing your message during the presentation so far.
- Funeral, I missed the purpose again, sorry for saying this again? I understand the process of the exercise. I get that you wanted to break the taboo about death, but for me there is no message.
- Why did you choose to present all of you? I really lost you because of the change of people
- Website - Why the tour? You could’ve just give them a short insight, that way you would have had more attention to your actual website.
- You talked about dopamine and mood for a while. what research on this did you do? For someone who specialises in cognitive and neurological influences in the psychology of learning, I have many questions about what you explained.
- I really enjoy everything you told and did. However, for me you didn’t tell me why you did everything, this has interfered with how I focussed on your presentation, I was pondering quite a lot about this.

Sorry for coming back to the same thing multiple times. As an academic this was very difficult for me to let go. Thank you for sharing!

- Andrés

- the presentation style is a little stilted, with almost all presenters using words like um and ehh and that in itself is not bad but it makes following a sentence difficult
- very good recovery laila was able to really fill in for him showing great initiative and helping diffuse the tension
- Did they reach out to anyone who was actually suffering loss to poll how they react to these items?
- the website looks amazing
- I think the little slides with the trip background was a little insensitive, especially to people who have anxiety about death or who are grieving

Hey! This is Jessie

I loved your topic, discussions, and I thought the exercises and things you did looked like a lot of fun.

One thing I noticed was this presentation was very much geared towards these exercises, and I felt like you skipped over the many discussions/conversations you had at the beginning. Since this minor is process oriented, I kind of missed how you got at this point and I would have loved to hear about your conversations.

Like I already asked: is there a taboo of death? You explained you talked to a person from a different culture and how you could sense it in your personal life. However, I would have liked to see more perspectives, like how it isn't a taboo at the same time (showing the death of corona patients as a mere number, talking about these deaths on the news, etc.). But also as I already mentioned, the breaking down of the taboo of mental illnesses and suicide. It's not like I don't agree, but I feel as if the side you showed was just that: one side, one perspective on a bigger story (at least in the presentation).

I was also wondering how you collaborated and combined different disciplines. Because it felt very fragmented. I think the practical, literal stuff you did was geared towards mulitple perspectives, but the uhm theory/knowledges side of your project wasn't so much.

You talked about experiencing death and talk about it a lot, and the way you said it, it almost felt to me as if death is something you can experience. While I believe death literally is the opposite of life, and is an absence of the senses, your conciousness, and so forth. At least your own death, you can't really experience it. Even the moment of dying is just that, the act of dying (which is actually still in a way the last moment of living). So, death is something you can only indirectly experience through the dying of your loved ones and that's why I kind of agreed with Francesca's comment that creating your own funeral misses the point of a funeral in that sense? It should be a tribute to you, but it isn't for you. It's for the people that are going to have to deal with missing you.

I loved your topic, etc, but I would have loved to hear all your interesting conversations about it.

I think the project has the potential to grow into a valuable initiative to have people actively engage with their relationship with death.

Speaking of approaching taboos:
- How would you approach the perspectives of people who kill outside of a medical context? For example: soldiers, criminal murderers, people working in slaughterhouses, accidental killers. How do they process the deaths that they were involved with?
- How about people who celebrate, or maybe even glorify, death? How do they relate themselves to mourners?

| Nathan

thanks for your presentation! The website is brilliantly made and I really enjoyed exploring it. You mentioned that your audience is people who are grieving but you also want to target people's general belief about death and break the "taboo". But the belief of death varies among different cultures. This diversity on the view of death is also seen in the way death is celebrated. The content of your website explores the worries and views that are involved in a Western-oriented view of death. Where is then your audience placed?

- Lydia

Thank you for bringing attention to this topic, I think it’s so important and so relevant! It makes me quite uncomfortable and anxious but this is exactly why it should be talked about. I enjoyed the fact you approached death from so many different viewpoints and talked to very different people about it and situated yourselves in the subject. What I am still wondering about are your chosen aesthetics. Why did you make the choices in the ways you did? What is the process behind? I would have been cool to play with past aesthetics that embraced death, such as gothic, and see how you can incorporate those in your visuals (by reclaiming and repurposing!). But otherwise, good job!!! -Gabija

Such a good initative! I will speak from a personal point of view because I have lost my father this year and naturally have been thinking about death a lot. During this year I have gotten more conscious and actually more scared of dying. Your presentation was uncomfortable to me and brought up a lot of negative feelings, but now, afterwards, I feel more calm and I am rethinking death in a more calm way. Thank you for that. - Celeste

I think your final "product" was super cool! Although at times it felt a bit simple (also maybe because our own process was so theory dense and this seemed very straightforward), I think that actually contributed to your goal of making death more accessible and something that you can talk about it a different way. When I heard your topic was going to be death, I found it very off-putting, but in the end I think the playfulness with which you approached it just kind of showed that yeah, we are all going to die and it's something that we should talk about more - it's a good start of the conversation.

My feedback on something I would have liked to see more is also what Jessie said: your process. I feel like the presentation was a bit too focused on what you created and less on how you got there. For instance, I don't really see how you guys transcended your disciplines or took a "multimodal" perspective. Maybe you did, but I just missed it a bit in the presentation. Maybe I should just listen to the podcast though :)

Overall, super good job! Chiara

thank you for tackling one of the most important topics of all!

we shoul

I think is super good that you draw attention to this topic! It is such an interesting and fundamental thing to think about, and indeed I also believe it is not discussed a lot in our society. I think you guys did an amazing job at already exploring so many different perspectives! I did not have time to check everything on your website, but I do feel like you try to do a lot of different things, and I would personally try to connect everything a bit more, so there is more of a red thread through we you try to share on your website. It is super nicely made btw, great job! When I read about the Wine and Dine exercise, I felt a bit uneasy as I know some people that would literally get a panic attach from doing this, so it might invoke some emotions that are quite hard to deal with if you are doing this by yourself.
Personally, I think it would be very nice to include more content on how other cultures deal with death and also historically how they dealt with death, to situate the topic a bit more. Near-death experiences would also be super interesting to explore and include. I would personally also try to bring things back to the present. What can you do with, you perhaps changed perspective on death by what you engage with on the website, to live fully in the present.
- Esmee

Interesting subject you have chosen. However I got the feeling you all explored it within your personal "boundaries" instead of overcoming and using the different disciplines in the team. This impression could also be due because there was not much of explanation of how you worked together and came up with the ideas.

The idea of organizing a w(h)ine and dine could have been briljant. Therefore it was sad that you let the corona situation determine you could not do it, because using this in your advantage would had made it even more interesting, as you were saying that especially in these times death is so hard on all of us in which we cant be physically together. It could have been translated to an online event (for example using VR or 4d sound and blindfolds and eating the same meals). I would recommend you to keep exploring! - Claire