According to Wikipedia, agency is 'the capacity of individuals to have the power and resources to fulfill their potential.' Thus mortal agency is controlling the outcome of your death: the financial and environmental factors to consider, the amount of participation by family and friends, your personal religious considerations, determining a location. It's a lot to think about, but if you don't, someone else will have to - and you may not like the outcome.
This project was originally intended to be a video documentary about embalming, but I realized that hardly anyone would choose to watch a movie on such a topic. How can I get an audience interested in a topic they avoid? Online quizzes!
So I moved the project to the web, with the intent of designing a site where people 'buried' themselves, 'cremated' themselves, forcing folks to think about what they're doing, and hopefully encouraging exploration.
Once I figured out how to get all the quizzes and scrolling pages to work, I submitted a draft to the Order of the Good Death's Fellowship program. Their supporting funds gave me the time and focus to complete the project and get it online.
My name is Brian Walsh, and I teach in the Department of Communcations at Elon University in North Carolina.
I'd prefer a green burial, if you were wondering.
I built this site without frameworks or stock imagery, using HTML, CSS, & JavaScript. Code for the entire site is on my GitHub and free to be re-used under Creative Commons license.
Animation in JavaScript using Greensock and Fullpage.js.
The images are all SVGs, and are added as HTML code; there are no 'image' tags or images that can be downloaded. I styled the images by using the 'Trace Image' function in Adobe Illustrator, and cleaned them up using SVGOMG. You can see a video of my process here.