A couple of weeks ago I attended the Southbank Centre's Death Festival For The Living. 

The event was delivered over 2 days with events scheduled around a range of topics, from organ donation to commemorative tattooing (apparently, the Wellcome Collection has the largest number of tattoed skins from the Victorian times on display in the world).

The aim of the event? To encourage people to share their stories and discuss and debate the often avoided topic of death and dying.

For me, the event was fascinating (it's a topic I have studied over the years). As a designer by background I especially liked Candy Chang’s 'Before I Die' giant chalkboard (above), which encouraged people to share their hopes and dreams in life. This was in stark contrast to one of our posts in last weeks Cerebral Snacks about the top 5 regrets of the dying. 

Our dear friend Lauren Currie from the Public Service Design company Snook shared her reflections from the 2 days in this lovely post.