shobhan s

inventing rituals

2023 tagged with: workshop, design fiction filed under: teaching

the working material of design is emotion.¹ and, ‘rituals’ serve as vehicles for emotional state-change.²

so: i wrote a course on inventing rituals, and ran it over two weeks with vijay sekhon’s interaction design programme (undergraduate studies, year 2) at anant university in ahmedabad.

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approach

near-future artefacts behaviours

the field of interaction design is disproportionately obsessed with objects, techno-futures and electronic-interfaces (like: screens). in our projects, however, we focused on behaviours : not objects.

provoke : don’t propose

designing ‘near-future behaviours’³ is a good way to encourage students to do two things: to prototype futures they would / wouldn’t like to live in, and then demonstrate those behaviours to “provoke instead of propose”.

for example: instead of declaring “this is what we think the future should be”, use your work to ask “is this a future you’d like to live in?”. in other words, instead of being paternalistic⁴, let’s be facilitative, and make participatory work.

process

• recreate existing rituals
• deconstruct an interaction / behaviour
• (theory & vocabulary)
• invent new rituals
• demonstrate & discuss

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step 1 — recreate existing rituals

step 2 — deconstruct an interaction / behaviour

students learned how to deconstruct an interaction: to observe keenly, record it (on a storyboard), and articulate it to someone else so that they can replicate it. (these are all things that an interaction designer needs to be able to do well.)

step 3 — theory & vocabulary

what are the features of a ritual, and what separates it from an interaction, habit or routine?

typically, rituals comprise history, context, people and objects, and involve emotions, behaviours and interactions. they manifest belief (for individuals, communities or cultures), are structured/ordered, tend to be extra-ordinary, and, do mark an occasion to make it memorable. down the ages, rituals have been regularly repurposed and hacked ; so, (as designers) we too can ascribe new objects, meanings, stories or contexts to rituals, or even invent entirely new ones.

step 4 — invent new rituals

designed objects are often accompanied by instruction manuals⁵ and videos. so, for our rituals (which are designed too), we created insruction-manuals and video-reels⁶ to share them with people.

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step 5 — demonstrate & discuss

we exhibited our work to the new media design programme at the the national institute of design, gandhinagar. the videos and manuals themselves weren’t the outcome of the project : the conversations they stimulated in the audience, were.

(afterward: nid’s students presented how making lo-fi prototypes helped them iterate-through and conceptually-refine their own projects.)

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colophon

students:
abhinandit singh, abhineet kumar, ananya bhardwaj, anuja malu, shriya barnwal, meet bhatt, chaitanya bodhekar, darshika lahoti, dhyeya pandya, shivangi gajjar, gauri sharma, gourave prasad, helly vaghasiya, keshika tank, ketki shroff, krishna, kunal khandale, manasi vinze, medha berlia, mohak indulkar, poorva bhombe, priyansh jolapara, purva tekale, r sudharsan, riaan shamdasani, riddhi musmade, riddhima kulkarni, riya khattri, rushil verma, sania goidani, shreya shinde, shubham kumar, tanishka vyas, vijay s, zarqa khan.

with thanks to:
vijay sekhon who led the interaction design track at anant university (in ahmedabad), and let me introduce his students to interaction design in this manner ; jignesh khakhar, whose ‘solving staging speculating’ structure for the new media design programme at nid prompted me to write this course⁷ ; and, jan rod, who was a director of interaction design at ideo-tokyo, and with whom i wrote the first draft for the course.

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footnotes:

shobhan s