Goodbye & Hello By Gewerk Design

Gewerk Design used two main elements in their 380-m2 Goodbye & Hello exhibition in Bern: white wood and black tape.

It was Dr Duncan MacDougall who attempted to weigh the human soul by placing dying patients on a scale and recording their weights before and after death. The average difference was 21 grams. No one has ever duplicated his experiment. The exhibition Goodbye & Hello: Dialogue with the Beyond oscillated between the known and the unknown in terms of both content and design. Berlin-based gewerk design created the exhibition, which featured people’s afterlife experiences, for the Museum of Communication in Bern. The setting was a fanciful white space lined in black stripes, which generated artificial perspectives, spatial illusions and bold contrasts that together influenced and disturbed the human sense of perception and orientation. ‘Our design prepared visitors for stories and objects from an unknown and foreign place – the hereafter,’ says Jens Imig of gewerk design. Goodbye & Hello received a 2009 iF communication design award and a nomination for the Design Preis Schweiz.