Designing burial monuments to increase emotional awareness in product design

The motivation for writing this paper is the growing concern in society towards the amount of products we produce containing low utility and sustainability. Through emotional awareness the student can design meaningful artifacts which extend being more than consumer goods. The hypothesis is that Product Design students designing burial monuments increase their awareness of emotional and meaningful artifacts, and increase their emotional awareness in the design process. Twenty students worked designing burial monuments for a stonemasonry. Their design process was researched trough use of archival studies and participatory observations. The study shows the theme affected the students emotionally, which again influenced their design process. The research indicates that designing burial monuments led to an increased emotional awareness for the majority of students participating in the project.