Goodbye Room — Dahoon Lee

If there are many kinds of goodbye, what might ‘the longest goodbye’ look like? Our group designed a futuristic funeral experience that begins with the premise of preparing one’s own funeral in advance. We wanted to translate the grief of loss into a more active form of comfort, alongside a sense of reunion.

The Longest Goodbye

Starting from the feeling of ‘if I could meet them just once more’, we proposed a warmer way of parting. Our aim was to design a future-facing funeral experience that reframes loss through intention, preparation, and connection.

Designing for Reunion

We explored different types of goodbyes by classifying them through multiple lenses, such as short vs long farewells and differences in timing and context. Focusing on funerals, we collected a wide range of related experiences using a direct storytelling approach. From the question, ‘What if I prepared my own funeral?’, we mapped how pre-prepared messages might change the experience of saying goodbye.

A funeral does not have to fix grief in place. It can be reconfigured as an interface that calls up memories, and that pre-designed messages are a key element in creating a sense of reunion.

Tag, Trigger, Remember

This is a message I prepared for you. Let’s meet again through this.

We ideated around what a future funeral could be, and developed an interaction where messages are revealed through object tagging. We chose TouchDesigner for its real-time media playback triggering – each NFC tag called up a different clip without a fixed sequence, keeping the experience non-linear.

Rear-projection was a deliberate spatial choice too: the image appeared to exist in the room rather than on a surface, creating a threshold between the physical object and the figure being recalled. By connecting TouchDesigner with NFC tag triggers, we implemented a message playback structure that links the present with those who have passed.

Ethics at the Threshold

We also discussed the possibility of using AI to learn a person’s personality, speech patterns, voice, and expressions, enabling an experience that feels like conversing with the deceased. Personally, I felt this approach needs careful handling, as it could risk intensifying loss rather than easing it.

This became an important reflection point for me as a designer in the age of AI: thinking not only about what is technically possible, but also about ethics, emotional impact, and wider consequences.