Designing With Ritual Interaction
Kristina Mah, Lian Loke, Luke Hespanhol
Abstract
Interactive public interfaces are opportunities for designers to affect how people relate to one another. We believe that traditional ritual can inspire a novel approach to the design of digital experience in public space. Ritual has been shown to support social cohesion and we argue that it can be used as a design strategy to encourage the cultivation of qualities like compassion in public space. We created our own interactive artwork, Wish Happiness that was inspired by methods of compassion cultivation from Tibetan Mahayana Buddhism. Through a concept-driven design research approach, we outline the set of design strategies we employed to translate key principles of Buddhist ritual and practice into the secular setting of a festival. We observed that compassion-like qualities, a positive state of mind and a sense of social harmony, were produced through interaction with the system, providing encouragement for future research into ritual interaction for compassion cultivation.