Design as a Ritual
Major Studio 1 | MFADT
A ritual establishes a system. While some may argue that setting constraints or establishing a process in a design may limit its creativity, setting up a ritual for your design allows you to think deeper about the subject and innovate within that constraint. An instance where this is relevant is in our professional lives, in which we must work under the assigned constraints or requirements for every assigned project. So, design can be a form of ritual.
I consider this exercise as a secular ritual because I was working under a set of constraints, and the routine involved following the ritual and the set of constraints I had defined for my work.
My design ritual had the following constraints:
- Time: 24 hours
- Content: Blockchain explanation
- Context: Age group (people)
- Form: As per context
The perspective of my ritual:
- Structure: explain blockchain to the target age group, create forms and interactive experiences and draw parallel with the existing system
- Function: accomplish an understanding of blockchain and its potential applications to the target age group
- Process: research and understand blockchain, filter the information for the age group for that day, brainstorm the most relevant representation for explaining blockchain to that age group, create that form, document the project
- Experience: live a different second reality every day – see through the eyes of the age group you want to understand blockchain
My ritual gave me an understanding of perspective – in what ways is one topic (Blockchain) relevant to different age groups. I realized why an important topic gets ignored by the people due to its technicality and that everything we create must be done keeping the target audience in mind. Everyone sees the world differently. So, breaking down what part of the whole must be shared with that audience is critical to the acceptance of the shared information/ experience.
Additionally, creating brainstorming videos for every project helped me structure my flow and objective for that project.
Often, following a ritual allows us to have a better understanding of what we are doing. I started my ritual with an objective of explaining blockchain to different age groups of people. After having followed the ritual for 3 days, I realized that there is much more to blockchain than knowledge. The blockchain is not a technology but a community. And, seeing it through those eyes gave me a different perspective. Suddenly, a technical topic seemed much more relatable: when we talk about technology, we talk about its adoption, but for a community, we think about a group we can be a part of. I understood that the blockchain community wants people to be a part of it and wants everyone to join. Only then can it achieve its true potential.
This was an interesting finding as now, I realized that instead of talking about the functionality of blockchain, I should focus on its applications. So, I applied this understanding for my next rituals – projects for day 4 and day 5, in which I explained the applications of blockchain with the central idea being how we can be a part of this community and contribute to a better future. So, what started with knowledge sharing ended with spreading awareness. The ritual led me there.
My approach in this exercise was to select the age group and create content relevant to that age group based on my experience and research. As a result, I could not validate the relevance of my creation.
Since I was unable to test my project with my audience (the respective age group), if I could do this project again, I would collect real-time feedback on my creations and tune the project based on the received feedback.
Link to the projects I completed in this ritual:
