Place design for healing rituals

Esther Sternberg studies how places — and the design of spaces — can affect humans’ well-being. In terms of affecting stress, health, recovery, peace of mind, and other intangible but very felt conditions. Her work highlights the importance of how places are designed — and the potential for people to design their own living/working environments to create better triggers, contexts, …

Turkish kolonya refresh ritual

A sketch of a very ordinary Turkish ritual, that occurs when you visit someone’s home or business. They splash cologne (kolonya) on your hands — lemon, rose, tobacco scented — and then you rub it over your hands and splash it on your face. Refreshment!

Applying a Fire God Ritual into Product Design

A book chapter from Cross-Cultural Design,  A Study of Applying Sakizaya Tribe’s Palamal (The Fire God Ritual) into Cultural Creative Products Design, profiles the authors’ attempts to take a very specific ritual (a memorial ceremony from an indigenous group in Taiwan) and trying to draw upon its details & symbols to make better product design. The chapter’s abstract The Palamal …

IDEO’s Childbirth Ritual concept designs

via IDEO Imagines Five Products That Remake the Ritual of Childbirth | Co.Design | business + design. In our diversifying and increasingly secular society, rituals that unify us are dying by inches. But we still share a multitude of events, such as childbirth. Can new products and rituals stoke our memories and communal bonds? IDEO’s Designs On: Birth is the …

Apple Product Unpacking rituals

This story from Forbes on the importance of packaging highlights a quote from Walter Isaacson’s book on Steve Jobs, that focuses on how the team at Apple (especially as led by designer Jony Ives) brought ritual into the entire product experience. They were trying to create interaction rituals, even as the user was unpacking the electronic from its box.  How …

Russian departure ritual

Here is a ritual I experienced in small-city Russia.  Before you leave for a big trip — to another city, another country — you take a seat just before you head out the door.    

Makeshift issue on ritual & creativity

Makeshift — A field guide to hidden creativity has a new issue out, all about ritual.  Some of the articles are online.  They gather together examples of rituals, especially as used to be more creative & engaging. Thanks to David Jenka for passing this along to us! They inventory their community’s creativity rituals. From a clear workspace to a clear …

Birthday rituals for adults

An interesting idea via How to Celebrate the Perfect Birthday (9 Ideas) by Kevin F. Adler on The Huffington Post: how can we design excellent birthday rituals for adults — who no longer have the status of being a kid & getting to relish their birthday openly & often? What would a good birthday ritual look like for someone in their …

10 Creative Rituals You Should Steal from entrepreneurs & creatives

via 10 Creative Rituals You Should Steal – 99U. Sustained creativity doesn’t come from a flash of brilliance or a single afternoon of inspiration. It comes from a consistent routine that serves as the bedrock for getting things done. At 99U we’ve spoken with dozens of entrepreneurs, researchers, and creatives about their unique routines. Below are some of our favorites …

Graphic Design and Religion

via Graphic Design and Religion A Call for Renewal – Daniel Kantor – GIA Publications. Graphic Design and Religion by Daniel Kantor challenges the way we look at the role of graphic design within a religious context. The beautiful and abundant illustrations coupled with the passionately written text transcend the mere visual aspect of symbols and graphic design, elevating them …

Design Anthropology for better product design

Dori Tunstall has a rich blog of insights on design anthropology, and how we can combine a deep appreciation of people’s behaviors together with our design process. She has studied different rituals and used them to create new product design — like around grooming rituals. Here she sets it apart from ‘market research’: Yoko Akama has been in interesting critic …

Creative Routines

An infographic of artists’ & writers’ creative rituals, from Info We Trust.

How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons

Colin Dayan wrote a 2011 book on legal rituals & their effect on our sense of ourselves: The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons.  It explores how legal rituals often challenges our personal identity through threats, degradation, dispossession.  She spotlights abusive rituals that have been enshrined in law — torture, slavery, solitary confinement, preventative …

Sun Dial: Exploring Techno-Spiritual Design through a Moblie Islamic app

Sun Dial: Exploring Techno-Spiritual Design through a Mobile Islamic Call to Prayer Application is a paper from back in 2008 about possible concepts to serve Muslims’ prayer practices through interesting technology. The team in Atlanta worked with the local Muslim community to tap into their current & historical rituals, and then figure out new, modern ways to serve them. Here …

Cem rituals from Alevis in Turkey

The Alevis are a sect in Turkey. This BBC 4 documentary on different religious practices around the world visits an Alevi community in Istanbul to see their religious and folk rituals in action.

Baby-Jumping to clean them of sin in Spain

In the small town of Castrillo de Murcia, people jump over infants laid down on mattresses, to cleanse them of their ‘original sin’. From Wikipedia: Baby jumping (El Colacho) is a traditional Spanish holiday dating back to 1620 that takes place annually to celebrate the Catholic feast of Corpus Christi in the village of Castrillo de Murcia near Burgos. During …

Telling a story every night to my kids before going to sleep

With a startup of which I am a cofounder, work gets intense and family time takes a hit. But one ritual I have religiously followed is to lie down with my kids as they go to sleep and have a 10 min story time or discussion time every day. This releases a lot of tension and has been an extremely …

Is This Your Brain On God?

via Is This Your Brain On God? : NPR.: Brain Interactive is a piece on NPR with lots of video & audio discussing how religion, near-death experiences, and god affects us physically & neurologically. More than half of adult Americans report they have had a spiritual experience that changed their lives. Now, scientists from universities like Harvard, Pennsylvania and Johns …

Daily Rituals of artists, a book by Mason Currey

via Mason Currey‘s site, where his book Daily Rituals is profiled: Franz Kafka, frustrated with his living quarters and day job, wrote in a letter to Felice Bauer in 1912, “time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible then one must try to …

Daily Rituals of Famous Authors 

via Daily Rituals of Famous Authors | Mason Currey. All of us have the same 24 hours a day to do things we need and want to do. But it often seems that certain people manage to do more with their allotted hours. How is it that some of us can barely manage to stay on top of our laundry (I’m speaking …

Late night suit rituals

There is something magical, useless & bizarre about David Letterman’s 1980s series of suit-related adventures.  They are not exactly rituals per se, but there is some strange mojo going on that should be considered by a ritual designer in figuring out how to incorporate illogical but compelling factors into their plans. The suit of alka-seltzer The suit of sponges The …

People & their Things: organizing & home rituals

The WBUR radio show Here & Now has a piece on De-Cluttering Your House With Love — more coverage of the wonderful little thing-related ritual book on “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing.”   Marie Kondo has built a huge following in her native Japan with her “KonMari” method of organizing and de-cluttering. …

Feather ritual from Darjeeling Limited

Wes Anderson’s film The Darjeeling Limited is chock full of rituals — or constructions that hope to become rituals, but don’t quite come off. This short clip from the film shows one Feather Ritual that does seem to work. Its purpose is not entirely clear, but the theater of the ritual is on display.

Decluttering ritual

via From Japan, Marie Kondo explores the joy of minimalism at home. The Detroit Free Press Katherine Roth, Associated Press November 29, 2014 If you haven’t communed with your socks lately, thanked your shoes for their hard work or bowed at least mentally to your home in appreciation, maybe it’s time to consider it.”It is very natural for me to …

Why Rituals Work

Why Rituals Work – Scientific American. May 14, 2013 |By Francesca Gino and Michael I. Norton iStock/EVRENSEL BARIS BERKANT Think about the last time you were about to interview for a job, speak in front of an audience, or go on a first date. To quell your nerves, chances are you spent time preparing – reading up on the company, …

The Power of Rituals in Life, Death, and Business

via The Power of Rituals in Life, Death, and Business — HBS Working Knowledge. An article from Harvard Business School, June 3, 2013,by Carmen Nobel Experimental research by Michael I. Norton, Francesca Gino, and colleagues proves multiple benefits of using rituals. Not only do they have the power to alleviate grief, but they also serve to enhance the experience of …

Why Rituals Matter Part 1: My Daily Tea Ritual

Why Rituals Matter Part 1: My Daily Tea Ritual – Samovar Tea Lounge. Why Rituals Matter Part 1: My Daily Tea Ritual By Jesse Jacobs It seems that as life has gotten faster and faster, we humans have managed pretty well to keep up with the speed. But I I believe Gandhi: “That there is more to life than increasing …

Conversation Rituals & Baby Development

Quality of Words, Not Quantity, Is Crucial to Language Skills, Study Finds – NYTimes.com. A study presented on Thursday at a White House conference on “bridging the word gap” found that among 2-year-olds from low-income families, quality interactions involving words — the use of shared symbols (“Look, a dog!”); rituals (“Want a bottle after your bath?”); and conversational fluency (“Yes, …

The Importance Of Ritual To The Creative Process

The Importance Of Ritual To The Creative Process | Fast Company | Business + Innovation. Art Markman published a blog post on Fast Company on the importance of rituals in creativity: To really develop a habit for creative practice, you need a regular ritual. For example, Stephen King (a prolific and creative writer) sits down each morning to write for …

Lessons From The Crematory

Interview: Caitlin Doughty, Author Of ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes And Other Lessons From The Crematory’ : NPR. Mortician Caitlin Doughty says she romanticized working in a crematory, like this one in Watertown, Mass. But the reality is that modern crematories are “really industrial environments and the body goes into large industrial machines.” And, she says, “oftentimes I was the …

Watermelon cutting, watermelon eating

This is a ritual for choosing & eating a watermelon. It’s practical but respectful.  It’s from Turkey. Choose your melon by knocking on its side and listening for a tok tok sound — that’s a good melon. You take the biggest knife you have. Then you hold the watermelon upright and carve off the watermelon’s head. Say Bismillah as you …

Death Over Dinner

Death Over Dinner  is a strong deep service/interaction design concept that  I come across recently about end of life planning. This is definitely one of the transition products that might help people to get prepared for the grandeur transition. From their description, the idea is providing tools and scripts for individuals to organize a ritual and gather people around a table …

Making Meaning

Making Meaning by Steven Diller, Nathan Shedroff, and Darrel Rhea gives valuable insights on what people value and look for in products. The book’s target audience is mainly business people, however, designers can easily relate to the arguments and presentation of information throughout the book. Two quick observations from the book, cover is unbearably bad designed, and there’s a lot …

why ritual works

Researchers Francesca Gino and Michael Norton from Harvard Business School conducted a research study on rituals in the context of loss and grieving rituals. What they find is that people who went through a ritual in the hard times feel less grief than those who didn’t. Here’s an excerpt from a blog post that they wrote in Scientific American While …

Wellbeing in Work Place

Steelcase anthropologist Donna Flynn talks about the changing dynamics of office design in our highly distributed work environment. Having discussed dimensions of we versus I, privacy and collaborative environments, she put well-being to the core of the designing future office spaces. Good and easy read: Quote Another quest, another question: “People are the most important asset of a company,” Flynn …

Design Your Life, self-mapping exercise

  An excerpt from a Huffington Post new year’s article by Linda Tischler, profiling the designer/artist Ayse Birsel’s exercises to help a person to redesign her life…. In her studio at Birsel + Seck, Birsel tackles each design project using four major steps: deconstructing the project, developing a new point of view, reconstructing a hierarchy, and expressing the result in …

Prayer Companion

A quick postcard from MOMA, with it’s design exhibit featuring one ingenious prayer machine that provides a steady stream of things that the viewer can pray for….

5 Main Strategies for Behavior Change

medynskiy-yarosh-chi2011.pdf (application/pdf Object). A short CHI paper from Lana Yarosh that sums up the basic 5 strategies that current health + wellness projects take, to encourage users behavior change. Strategy Cheat Sheet 1. Set specific, short-term goals. 2. Set actionable goals. 3. Set goals the user is confident she can attain. 4. Use cues-to-action to trigger positive behaviors. 5. Allow …

A Kosher Internet?

Orthodox Jews Rally to Keep the Internet Kosher | Underwire | Wired.com. NEW YORK — If keeping dairy products separate from meat sounds like a pain, try cultivating a “morally kosher atmosphere” on the internet. That’s the challenge faced by Orthodox Jews, who recognize the internet’s place in the business world but shudder at the “filth” found online. That paradox …

Marco Maiocchi on Design for Waiting Rooms

If the previous post was on how to build more well-being into hospitals for children, what about for adults?  It’s a harder question, because the adult patients will have more awareness of what is going on, likely more anxiety about what this hospital visit means for their future, and no parents to buffer their experience. Marco Maiocchi, in Milan, has …

Small body behaviors for use in rituals

Lifehacker is full of small daily things to do to make life a little livelier.  These could be mini-behaviors to incorporate into a ritual design.  They are not rituals by themselves, but they are ripe material to use by ritual designers.

Puppies as wellbeing service

My framework on well-being design & bringing rituals into our lives reminds me of an NPR radio show talking about puppies, which are part of a multi-purpose transition program called Puppies Behind Bars. There are two phases of the program. First part is the education of these smart dogs either for service dogs for veterans or as bomb-sniffing dogs. For education, they …

New Jewish ritual design products

I came across Reinventing Ritual at the library, and just delighted by the title, borrowed it without hesitation. Reinventing Ritual is originated from the exhibitions on contemporary Jewish life, which was held at Jewish museum in New York. In the preface, Arnold Eisen comments on how ritual brings meaning to our lives: “Thank goodness. I don’t know what I would do without ritual, …

Meditation Apps

Smartphone Apps that help you to meditate, relax, recenter, and take control — during busy work days or during bouts of insomniac nights From a New York Times review. A taste: A path to a quiet mind can travel through apps dedicated to guided meditation and sleep enhancement. And fortunately, for those who need more, or better, rest, or who are …

Design as Religion

A dig from AIGA’s website, an article Design as Religion. Nick Currie makes an elegant reading of the contemporary design shops, comparing them with respect to the religious experience. Here is an excerpt from his blog post: Well, here’s my credo. I’m not a designer, but I love design. I love stores like Analogue, Magma and Zakka. I enter them …

Positive Psychology & Wellbeing

Psychology traditionally deals with problematic situations and clinical cases. Martin Seligman, however, is a person who looks at the other side of the coin. He is the pioneer of positive psychology that looks at the strengths and potential of normal people. In this TED talk below, he gives a good summary of positive psychology and the importance of design as …

Sprituality As We Eat

A NYTimes article today on “Mindful Eating”, from a Buddhist tradition.  After each bite, pause, taste, wait.  Slow food, but with a spiritual edge. Some tips: Consider These O.K., so you don’t happen to live in a Buddhist monastery. You can still give mindful eating a spin by incorporating a few chilled-out gestures and rituals into your regular calorie intake. …

Spirituality in Wellbeing index

  A recent talk on developing well-being applications illustrates ways in which design can contribute to people’s well-being . It was given by the director of a non-profit called “meyouhealth”. I find the overall projects to be synced into design and holistic thinking. The company is following two promising approaches: behavior change is social, behavior change begins with small steps, one …

Calming Tech, Spiritual Tech

Stanford’s d.school has taught D.Compress: Designing Calm class last year, it will be offered again this year.  The students are supposed to build text, e-mail and other tech products that help people “create a calm state of mind” in the midst of overloaded professional and student lives. Some of the projects built last year in the class include several breathing-based …

Steve Jobs and Spirituality in Product Design

A reflective look upon Steve Jobs and Apple can reveal some untold dimension on spirituality. Having listened to his biography by Walter Isaacson recently, the first obvious observation is that his obsession for simplicity partly comes from Eastern spirituality. The manifestation of such spirituality is also a bit paradoxical, if you think of Apple’s high-end segmentation and becoming an idol …

Catholic Confession App

How can technology spark religious reflection — including the not-so-exciting task of seeing where you’ve gone wrong lately?  There are plenty of smartphone apps to help the user take control of their weight, medical conditions, and work schedule — but what about their spiritual development? A Catholic app-developer out of South Bend, Indiana published the Confession app that is meant …

Magic Shirts

Is it possible to think of words as technology? We live in a world of  hyper-linked words, but we haven’t yet seen enacting words. Here is an inspirational look at words, and from the ottoman times: Magic shirts. Hulya Tezcan, a professor in Istanbul, recently published a book on the magic shirts of Ottoman Sultans. She stated: Famous calligraphers, muralists, …

Skypanukkah + other Virtual Rituals

Julie Scelfo at the The New York Times had a piece today profiling how families are using video chat technologies to celebrate religious rituals together, virtually. One example, from a Jewish family in Birmingham, Michigan: “Debra and Martin Darvick set out a tin menorah given to them by long-gone relatives. Their son, Elliot, 27, struck a match and lighted the …

The Rosary Ritual & Yoga Mantra Ritual: for good breathing

Luciano Bernardi, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Pavia in Italy, published a study that found recitation of prayers had a beneficial effect on breathing rate, blood pressure, and circulation of blood to the brain. He studied two types of recitations in particular — the Catholic rosary, said in Latin, and yoga mantras.  He found that both …

Frontier Vest

Frontier vest is a conceptual product developed by Azra Aksamija from MIT. As it is described in her website: “The Frontier Vest hybridizes different religious equipment and a contemporary vest design. This wearable prototype lends itself for different purposes, both sacred and secular. Pointing at the shared histories and belief systems of Judaism and Islam, the Frontier Vest can be …