grief garden
A participatory digital memorial holding space for climate grief.
In this project (part of Mournful Design for Critical Climate Futures), our goal was to forge communal relations by centering grief in discussions of climate impacts. It is an exploratory website comprised of colored cells and Unicode characters made to resemble a landscape. Visitors to the site can scroll to navigate and click on symbols to reveal embedded memorials. These memorials are either a quote and link to read more, as in the case of memorials we initially populated the site with, or a description of a memorial another visitor has added. If they click on an open cell, participants can add their own memorial by responding to prompts asking them to describe and name their mourning and choosing a color for their memorial. As such, the website functions as a participatory digital climate graveyard, engaging its audience with stories both curated and crowdsourced to reveal the many ways climate grief is both felt and processed.
The Grief Garden aim’s to center care by opening space for free expression of grief and loss, configured in relation to other participants in the space. Despite the limited functionality across users, and the relative anonymity of contributions to the space, users of the Grief Garden can express care for the environment and for others through their reading and contributions to the garden. In doing so, care collectively connects people through their relationships to the natural world and each other, furthering a more caring climate future. The Grief Garden is centered around a practice of naming what has been lost — each memorial, each filled pixel, is a tangible mark, a physical representation of something that has been lost or stands to be lost in the face of the climate crisis. In reading through other memorials or adding their own, visitors recognize the varied ways in which grief can be and is felt.