Two University of Southern California researchers and designers, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz and Jeff Watson, presented at a Swiss Design Network event, Unfrozen, about ritual design.

Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Jeff Watson,The concept of the ‘interaction ritual’ figured strongly in Julian Bleecker’s (2009) essay on design fiction. But since then, in discussions of design fiction and speculative design this attention to ritual, and embodied experience in general, has largely taken a back seat to accounts of design fiction that focus on discursive objects as diegetic props. While such props can provoke their beholders to imagine novel interaction rituals, designers often treat these psychological “effects” of imagination as epiphenomena of the designed object rather than as structured experiences which themselves might be available to speculative manipulation.

He is talking about how designers can better imagine new worlds with design fictions, including new rituals. He talks about interaction rituals in possible future worlds, to help imagine new ways to communicate, including between machines and humans.