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The Netherlands – Dutch Design Week 2025 has so far prompted visitors to question what it means to be human, and what challenges that notion more than death itself.

Death, in its many forms, feels omnipresent. From the relentless coverage of war on social media to the growing prevalence of unregulated violence, we are constantly confronted with mortality. It’s no wonder that designers are turning their attention to how we process, memorialise and even transcend loss.

Mementum by Linjing Wu, a master’s student at HTW Berlin University of Applied Sciences, explores digital heritage as both emotional and practical inheritance. The wearable concept integrates asset management, memorial spaces and AI companions to reframe death as a form of transformation, asking what it means to live on virtually and emotionally after we’re gone.

Similarly, Memorial Objects by Mattie van Bergen considers how grief can be made visible and tangible. Through objects that embody memory in three-dimensional form, van Bergen materialises mourning, offering a tactile response to loss in an increasingly immaterial world.

The theme of transformation through emotion also extends beyond human mortality. In Clay and Climate Grief, designer Katinka Feijs invites participants to translate ecological anxiety into tangible expression. Through making, dialogue and ritual, this social design workshop turns clay into a vessel for grief, care and hope, creating intimate altars that hold space for reflection and reconnection with self, others and the planet.

Elsewhere, death takes on a digital dimension. At Next Nature Museum, the focus shifts from human demise to the afterlife of data. Technosferatu, hosted by IMPAKT, examines the techno-utopian pursuit of eternal life and its cost to human agency. Through a sensor-activated, coffin-like installation, it exposes how longevity culture transforms the body into data, reframing life, ageing and vulnerability as systems to be optimised.

The fragility of this digital existence is echoed in The Digital Decaying Text Machine, an installation that visualises how information erodes with neglect. Using sensors and an algorithm that degrades text based on user attention, it reveals how meaning dissolves as engagement fades, a poetic reminder that even in the cloud, nothing truly lasts for ever. LS:N Global has been tracking the topic of digital afterlives since 2021.

Stay tuned for more daily coverage of Dutch Design Week 2025.