Designing speculative rituals: tangible imaginaries and fictive practices from the (inter)personal to the political

This dissertation makes the case for treating rituals and other structured categories of practice as objects of designerly attention. As scholars from ritual studies will tell us, humans have a long history of designing rituals, but this phenomenon is rarely explored within design theory and practice. Arguing for the recuperation of the ‘interaction ritual’ in design fiction and speculative design, this dissertation represents an attempt to take seriously the mechanics of both human-to-human and human-to-machine interaction as a kind of material available to manipulation, not only through the explicit decisions about interfaces but also through speculation about tacit rules of engagement. In order to make this case, I focus in particular on four project areas: (1) a fictional lifelogging platform that becomes deeply embedded within a couple’s rituals of romance and conflict, (2) a series of designs that support rituals of relationship building between humans and objects, (3) a crowdsourced vox pop ritual, in which online audiences drive question-formation for a live on-the-street interview, and (4) a performative ritual involving an audience-driven telerobotic microphone that modulates its mood based on real-time feedback about the audience’s feelings towards a speaker. I use these projects to illustrate two categories of prototyping that I refer to respectively as ‘tangible imaginaries’ and ‘fictive practices.’ Fictive practices utilize the logic of a story world as a thinking tool for exploring embodied interaction within situated narrative contexts. And tangible imaginaries explore embodied interaction to speculate about imagined worlds. Using these prototyping techniques, I argue that designers can begin to tinker with mechanics of embodied interaction and carve out an imagination space for rituals that don’t exist (yet) but could.