This Major Research Project explores how end-of-life care in Intensive Care Units (ICUs) can be reimagined to ensure the dying's dignity, autonomy, and emotional well-being. Despite the curative focus of acute hospital care, a significant proportion of patients die in ICUs—often surrounded by invasive technologies, under stress, and without adequate emotional, spiritual, or relational support. The guiding research question asks: How might we redesign the ICU experience to ensure all patients achieve a “good death” that reflects their values, minimizes suffering, and incorporates patient-centered design, spirituality, dignity, and cultural dimensions into the dying process?

Employing a human-centered design and strategic foresight approach, the study draws on qualitative interviews with palliative care physicians, policy advisors, and interdisciplinary practitioners and a survey of loved ones who have firsthand ICU and hospital experience of their loved one’s death.

Methodologies include system mapping, speculative interventions, and thematic analysis. Findings reveal critical gaps in current care, including poor communication, lack of continuity of care, and minimal emotional or cultural support for patients and families.

Participants emphasized the need for earlier integration of palliative care, team-based approaches, and a broader definition of the “patient", including loved ones, spiritual care providers, artists, designers and community. The project offers future-oriented recommendations and calls to action to inform more compassionate, inclusive, and relationally grounded ICU design, reframing the experience of dying as a meaningful part of life, rather than a medical failure