Sensory Sanctuary
2018
Workshop
Toolkit
Design-led Research

The senses are deeply tied to meaningful, emotional memories - memories that tell us who we are. However, workshops with health care professionals, caregivers, end-of-life doulas, and individuals struggling with life-threatening conditions revealed that, at the end of life, when we most crave emotional peace, a dying person’s sensory needs are often overshadowed by practical facets of care. Many spend the last moments of life in hospitals, listening to the sounds of heart monitors, alarms, neighboring patients.

How might we create spaces of agency, comfort, and meaning to inhabit at the end of life? How might the process of imagining these spaces be a way into conversations about death and dying? How migh service providers, trained in rhetorical strategies for emotional comfort (i.e. end of life doulas and hospice care workers) help patients find emotional peace through the senses?

Sensory Sanctuary is a story, a guided reflection, a mobile-making workshop, and an educational experience. Prompts guide participants to attend to their senses in the present, then, remember the past. A guided mobile-making experience brings this knowledge into day to day spaces. By drawing from knowledge held in the body, we find what is most important. This project was presented at the INELDA conference for end of life.

Prompts engaging sense memories, discussion prompts, acrylic mobile frames, mobile stands, laser-cut wood, acrylic, beads, rings, hooks, feathers, pompoms, fishing wire, glue guns, glass jars

“...this workshop reminds us that people who are dying see things that we can’t.”
- participant, caregiver

Mobiles, created by participants

Participants electing materials

Workshops with experts informed initial direction

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