End-of-life is a profound and inevitable part of life, and thus, human condition. It raises significant and critical questions around the meaning, purpose, fairness and quality of life, on multiple individual, inter-personal, and societal levels. Design for end-of-life is an emerging area, gaining visibility and interdisciplinary interest. Current contributions around design and end-of-life are however, limited and disjointed, lacking in critical knowledge base and strategic vision. While valuable, such rush into interventional, operational and incremental contributions, is archetypal of design’s ‘problem-solving’ approach, and would risk obscuring the broader and potentially significant theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions between design and end-of-life. This paper argues the case for adopting a ‘problem framing’, transdisciplinary, systemic approach to this fascinating emerging field. By initiating, for the first time, a theoretically and empirically informed critical discourse between the two fields of design and end-of-life, critical questions, strategic opportunities, and significant contributions between the two fields could be identified and outlined
