Personal Takeaways:
The depth of knowledge, expertise & compassion in the room was electric & humbling. The diversity & inclusive nature of the workshop enabled engagement & the unfolding of India’s enormous range of cultural contexts.
It felt serendipitous to be working with Dr. Steven Cave’s team! I studied his work extensively while writing my thesis on the Role of Dignity in Death & Dying during my Master’s program at OCADU. The world is very small indeed.
The more we learn about grief & mortality, the more we understand how much work there is to be done together. Most people who come into this space are driven by benevolence to enable meaningful engagements & solutions.
What might some of the repercussions be for grief & the human experience that come from technology trying to ‘eliminate’ or ‘forever fix’ death? What happens to emotional & mental health when the feelings of talking to a digital loved one are real, but the reality isn’t? Are our mental health practitioners equipped to manage this form of grief? It may give complicated grief many new layers.
Who is responsible when the LLMs begin to hallucinate & go off script? What happens if digital avatars begin to influence the decisions of vulnerable grievers to keep them alive? (LLM stands for ‘large language model’ – a type of artificial intelligence that can understand and generate human language by analyzing vast amounts of text data. LLMs are commonly used in applications like chatbots, translation, and content generation.)
We play multiple roles in people’s lives. Which version of that avatar might get built? Imagine thinking about this & losing the present, real moments with loved ones.What happens to public figures? Who do they belong to, & do they get a say in whether their avatars get built?
We’re sitting at a crucial time where alluring & quick fixes to grief match the urgent culture & corresponding behaviors attached to it. This means that responsible & ethical guardrails need to be foundational in order to enable humanity, not disable it.
During the speculative futures exercise, we examined a digital afterlife company’s business model to assess its viability. As discussions deepened, many participants prioritized human concerns over AI’s allure, with many leaning toward rejection or contract rewrites despite potential profits.
Departure questions:What makes us focus more on the afterlife when there are multiple opportunities to design for life? There are so many areas in healthcare, aging & end-of-life care that need us.
As the wonderful & humble BJ Miller says: “So, if teasing unnecessary suffering out of the system was our first design cue, then tending to dignity by way of the senses, by way of the body — the aesthetic realm — is design cue number two. Now this gets us quickly to the third and final bit for today; namely, we need to lift our sights, to set our sights on well-being, so that life and health and healthcare can become about making life more wonderful, rather than just less horrible. Beneficence.”
What if you don’t want to be remembered? Is that an option in the age of AI?
Grateful to the researchers & participants for approaching this sensitive topic with such grace. It was a hopeful reminder that great minds are rooted in humanism.
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Krittika is the Creative Director & Founder of Maajhi, which humanizes loss, grief & finding meaning through multidisciplinary offerings.
She is passionate about ensuring that people have agency, dignity, information & the right to die well- on their own terms, & with the grace they deserve. Maajhi turned 10 in 2024, is the first of its kind in India & is growing globally.
Krittika is also a death meditation facilitation guide & is building her knowledge in the space of grief and yoga. She won a full scholarship for a grief educator program to learn under renowned grief expert, David Kessler, and is now a certified grief education coach..
Krittika has 15 years of experience in research, behavior design & creative strategy. She has designed for wellbeing across multiple sectors. The interest & urgency to work in the end-of-life care space came after being profoundly impacted by a personal incident, & she is deeply passionate about bringing dignity & wellbeing into the world of end-of-life care & the larger healthcare ecosystem.
She is the former director of Death Over Dinner (India)- the largest social campaign in the world, with over 200,000 dinners. She introduced the concept in India. As a senior strategist & engagement manager, she was a core team member who conceived, built & launched the first global End of Life (EOL) Collective- a digital platform for caregivers, care seekers & service providers.
She has partnered with Karunashraya, an award-winning hospice in India, for their annual education program for psycho-oncologists. The course has received endorsement from the International Psycho-Oncology Society. These collaborations are now expanding into research & multidisciplinary approaches that bring medicine, experience & participatory design together.
Krittika has worked with Fortune 100 companies in the space of wellbeing & purpose building through the lens of death & dying. Clients include Pfizer & Merck.
Krittika has presented her work on global platforms & has authored a chapter on wellbeing in death & dying in the Handbook of Happiness, commissioned by the Happiness Monk of Bhutan. She is currently a member of The Dying. Series Collective, Toronto (a part of DesignTO). Her work has been featured in multiple global & Indian newspapers. (Upcoming features: Forbes & Indian Genes).
Krittika was introduced to the world of applied behavioral economics & sciences infused with design thinking & research during her time at FinalMile. Her portfolio expanded into healthcare, financial services, the social sector & organizational behavior across India, the US, Canada, the UK, France & Tanzania.
Her expertise continues on this path today, driving progress for Fortune 250 companies, primarily in the space of Health & Life Sciences (HLS), with scaled solutions using AI, analytics & engineering. While her primary role was as a behavior design leader & mentor in the Experience team, she was a core team member in HLS at Fractal Analytics, responsible for developing the practice from its early days to one of the most thriving verticals in the company.
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