We have created our own Ritual Design concepts & implementations. Please explore them below, and link to their project pages for fuller description.

These are all research projects. We are creating rituals to explore how to create more meaningful interactions between people, and between people, social systems, and technology.

Virtual Team Rituals (2020)

We are working on a new research study to measure the effect of a virtual ritual on a team meeting or online class that is taking place in a video, remote manner. We will be reporting on the progress of this project on this page.

Why are we researching virtual rituals?

We want to understand if a ritual can increase the outcomes that participants + leaders are hoping to achieve at remote meetings — but are unsure of how to achieve, in this brave new world of remote work.

Research Team

Kursat Ozenc
Glenn Fajardo
Kavindya Thennakoon

Team Life Cycle rituals

These rituals were made during our Stanford workshops into how organizations can build better culture through more deliberate, values-driven interactions.

Crash the desk on Vimeo is a ritual to welcome new employees to work through a surprise game.

One Box is a matching interaction, to find more ways to build community with people outside your typical circle at work.

The Meeting Escape Hatch is a way to let people escape from meetings that they realize are not relevant to their work, without upsetting the person running the meeting.

Virtual Friday Party is an inter-office regular social time, that has employees share music, food, and community even if they are on different continents — to build a better culture across offices.

The Graduation Ceremony for new talent envisions a bigger celebration for new members of an organization, after they have passed through an initial period with the company.

 
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The Farewell Design

A speculative design from the class ‘Decay of Digital Things’ that is meant as a provocation — about our relationship with our computers and what we do with it as it breaks down.
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The Zen Door

A space design from the class Prototyping SF, that was installed on San Francisco’s Market Street as a refresh-reflection station in the city.
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Parking Ticket Sautee

A design fiction about small moments of rage and disappointment.
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Market Street Wish Wall

During our Zen Door installation in downtown San Francisco for April 2015’s Market Street Prototype Festival, we constructed a wish ritual for passers-by to stop — think of a wish — write it down on a tag — and tie it onto our Zen Door.

People wrote wishes on a manila tag, chose a ribbon, and then tied it onto the grid of strings we had created on the side of the installation. Over the course of the two days, the grid began growing into a Wall.

Ritual Design: market street wishes from Margaret Hagan

Now that the Festival is over, we saved the hundreds of wish tags & will be posting them here to capture & honor these wishes.

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IdeaPOP: a ritual design generator

IdeaPop: a ritual design app from Margaret Hagan on Vimeo.

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Our Sketchbook of ritual design concepts

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An inventory of rituals

We are collecting examples of rituals — big, small, old, new, collective, personal. We hope these will be useful for ritual designers to find patterns & inspiration.

Some of them are “ritual design:, where the designers, artists and developers have tried to create new, playful, concept designs & design interventions that draw on more traditional rituals or try to build new ones.

Want to add a ritual to our inventory? Submit it to us here, at the bottom of the page.

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Add a ritual to our inventory

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