The Reflection Room: Participatory Art Installations to Move us from Death-denying to Death-discussing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BackgroundAdvances in medicine, the rise of a funeral industry and the increased availability of hospitals have distanced people from the direct experience with death. As a result, thinking about dying and death is something we tend not to do and those who promote advance care planning would like us to do more. There are efforts like Death Cafu00e9s that encourage dialogue about dying but they are designed for people ready to discuss death.AimThe aim of this study was to investigate whether an intervention enabling recording and reading of personal experiences of dying and death could produce an increase in comfort in discussing and planning for death, and whether the interventionu2019s design elements had an influence. MethodsWe used a participatory action research approach and installed versions of The Reflection Room in 33 public and healthcare settings across Canada. Each room had an open invitation to read other peoplesu2019 stories of dying and death and to leave a personal u201creflectionu201d. We analyzed the stories thematically and by setting type, and conducted a survey of Room visitors to gauge changes in attitudes to and comfort with death. Results In general, the intervention increased comfort with discussing death with families among some but not all visitors and resulted in some advance care planning. Sombre, calming installations encouraged less participation than brighter installations with stories framed and mounted as art pieces. Healthcare providers used the installations more for personal reflection than professional. Shared stories included regrets and gratitude, advice to others, and messages for the dead. Conclusion Providing carefully designed spaces for people to record publicly their experiences with dying, to take time to learn about othersu2019 experiences and to share stories for others to read appears to move people from death-denying to death-discussing. It also enabled processing of unresolved grief, and brief memorializing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.022 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".