Family Rituals 2.0
Design Futures
Abstract
Family Rituals 2.0 sort to reveal some of the challenges of working away from home from a sociological and specifically ethnographic perspective.
Method
We designed five bespoke Ritual Machines for five participant households who experience separation from home due to work.
Takeaways
These machines were playful and provocative; they were not solutions to the “problem” of absence from home, but rather a way of provoking conversation about the family's attitudes to home and work life.
Family Rituals 2.0 sort to reveal some of the challenges of working away from home from a sociological and specifically ethnographic perspective. It was an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council funded project with partners from Newcastle University and the Royal College of Art, University of the West of England and Bournemouth University.
At Open Lab, with our partners at the Royal College of Art, we designed five bespoke Ritual Machines for five participant households who experience separation from home due to work. These machines were playful and provocative; they were not solutions to the “problem” of absence from home, but rather a way of provoking conversation about the family's attitudes to home and work life. Engaging with the families through cultural probes and interviews, we identified some existing domestic rituals and in response created a bespoke machine that enables, extends or perturbs these rituals during periods of absence. Each machine typically lived with the family for one month.
The machines were exhibited at the project's final show at the London Design Festival (September 2015). Three machines were displayed at the Science Gallery's HOME\SICK Show (May 2015) [watch the interview].
Publications
Making Ritual Machines: The Mobile Phone as a Networked Material for Research Products Chatting D, Kirk D S, Durrant A C, Elsden C, Yurman P and Bichard J. CHI 2017 (May 2017). [DOI]
Ritual Machine IV: A Message in a Jam Chatting D, Yurman P, Bichard J and Kirk D S. CHI 2017 The Things of Design Research workshop (May 2017). [PDF]
Ritual Machine V: Where are You? Chatting D, Yurman P, Green D, Bichard J and Kirk D S. RTD 2017 (March 2017). [DOI]
Ritual Machines I & II: Making Technology at Home Kirk D S, Chatting D, Yurman P and Bichard J. CHI 2016 (May 2016). [DOI]
Ritual Machine V: Where are You? Chatting D, Kirk D S, Yurman P and Bichard J. CHI 2016 Object Outcomes workshop (May 2016). [PDF]
Designing for Family Phatic Communication: A Design Critique Approach Chatting D, Kirk D S, Yurman P and Bichard J, British HCI 2015 (July 2015). [DOI]
Quotidian Ritual and Work-Life Balance: An Ethnography of Not Being There Bichard J, Yurman P, Kirk D and Chatting D, Proceedings of EPIC 2014, p. 163-178 (September 2014).