Designing for the Dead

Minimalism Looks Great Until You’re Standing in a Graveyard

In design school, you’re taught to solve problems.

The user must navigate seamlessly. Clarity is paramount. The interface should disappear. Good design, we’re told, is clean, functional, minimalist. “A machine for living,” as Le Corbusier once wrote.

But what happens when the user is no longer alive? When the space isn’t meant to be used, but remembered? When the goal isn’t clarity — but presence?

There is no ‘end user’ in a cemetery. No A/B test for grief.

The dominant design philosophies — Le Corbusier’s modernism, Dieter Rams’ functionalism, today’s user-obsessed UX frameworks — fall apart when applied to death, memory, and historical violence. Their obsession with streamlining erases the very friction that gives memory its meaning.

We do not mourn in straight lines.

We do not inherit the past neatly.

We return to places not for answers, but for resonance.

Designing for the dead is not about ease of use — it’s about the weight of presence.

When design erases

Too often, we use design to sanitize memory. We flatten plantation sites into wedding venues. We transform schools named after enslavers into luxury condos. We smooth the jagged edges of the past into something marketable.

This is not remembrance. It is aestheticized forgetting.

And yet we have other models — designs that refuse resolution. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, for example, does not allow you to look away. Rusted steel columns, engraved with the names of lynching victims, hang like bodies above you. The path is not linear. The structure does not comfort.

In fiction, Shirley Jackson’s Hill House offers something similar: a home that remembers more than its occupants do. Doors close on their own. Corridors don’t end where they should. The house is never fully seen — only felt.

Good memorials don’t simplify the past — they make the present harder to ignore.

But not all ghosts are angry

Still — designing for the dead doesn’t mean designing only for pain. It means making space for complexity. For laughter, joy, and the small absurdities of a life once lived.

In Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, the presence of the dead is familial, layered, intimate. Ghosts don’t terrorize — they testify.

In Toni Cade Bambara’s short stories, memory feels like neighborhood gossip, childhood games, and kitchen rituals. The dead are woven into dailiness. Their presence is part of the fabric.

And in the physical world, take Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Yes, it’s a burial site, but it’s also a space of community. People picnic there. Children run between headstones. Memory here includes the mundane and the marvelous. It says: you were more than the way you died.

Designing for the dead must hold both truths:

• That trauma leaves residue

• And that joy leaves echoes too

The sacred doesn’t only manifest in sorrow — sometimes it lingers in laughter.

What periwinkle knows

If modernist design clears space, Southern Gothic fills it with heat, rot, and stories that won’t stay buried.

And at the center of many Southern cemeteries, you’ll find periwinkle. Vinca minor. Graveyard groundcover. A flower that grows where burials were once shallow, and time has passed unacknowledged. It does not bloom to be admired. It blooms because something beneath the surface is still unresolved.

In my own work building miniature rooms — haunted, speculative, rooted in Southern folklore — I return to this motif often. In one space, periwinkle breaks through the floorboards of a child’s room left untouched. No one goes inside anymore, but the flower grows anyway, curling toward the light.

It’s not symbolic.

It’s structural.

Periwinkle doesn’t bloom to be seen — it blooms because something is still buried.

Toward a new design practice: narrative, not neutrality

If we are to design spaces that honor the dead, we must abandon the notion of neutrality. Design is never neutral. Neither is silence. Neither is what we choose to preserve, versus what we let decay.

Southern Gothic literature gives us a model: it refuses tidy moral binaries, demands that setting do emotional labor, and insists on lingering in what was never resolved.

Think of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, where 124 is more than haunted — it is haunting. The house groans. It remembers. It punishes. It protects. It carries trauma not as theme, but as structure.

Or Edward P. Jones’s The Known World, where the landscape itself is shaped by the legal, logistical, and intimate contradictions of American slavery. Jones’s prose places spatial relationships at the center of moral questions: who owns what, who lives where, who gets buried, and how.

Storytelling is not the decoration of design — it is its structure when the living are no longer the audience.

The balance: make it safe to enter, but impossible to forget

The goal is not to traumatize. It is to tell the truth — in a way that honors both the wound and the witness. Design for confrontation, yes. But do so with care. With intention. With room to breathe.

Let people pause. Let them weep. Let them laugh. Let them leave changed.

Because ultimately, when we design for the dead, we are also designing for the living people they left behind.

People who carry their names.

Their silences.

Their songs.

To design for the dead is not to resurrect them — it is to prevent their disappearance.

And if periwinkle keeps growing — it’s because we still haven’t said enough.