Rituals and Interactive Technologies: Designing Extraordinary Experiences

Rituals have played crucial roles in cultural, societal, and individual lives, preserving cultural memories, shaping social structures, and imbuing life with meaning. While this remains true today, rituals have evolved and people increasingly appropriate interactive technologies, even if they are not specifically designed for rituals, and irrespective of whether Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research focuses on it. However, despite rituals’ importance for people and their increasing overlap with interactive technologies, rituals and related design issues are only vaguely researched in HCI. To address these gaps and outline this emerging research area in HCI, this thesis transfers ritual theories to HCI, structures previous work applying a newly-developed classification scheme of four ritual dimensions (ritual complexity, variability, actor(s), and origin), and condenses findings from five publications that investigated real-world cases of rituals with interactive technologies, and intentionally designed interactive technologies for rituals. This thesis presents empirical evidence for the real-world existence and relevance of rituals with interactive technologies. People of all ages use various interactive technologies for diverse rituals: Young adults invent new rituals around their smartphones to feel more grown up (P1), couples simultaneously delete their dating apps to symbolise the start of a relationship (P4), and older adults use streaming platforms to participate in worship services (P2, P3). Analysing such real-world examples, this thesis develops a second classification scheme of three roles interactive technologies take in rituals: the role of facilitators simplifying ritual tasks, enablers inviting extraordinary ritual experiences, or social actors being emotionally valued and thus taking centre stage in rituals (P1). Interactive technologies were rarely intentionally designed for use in rituals, especially as enabler or social actor, and sometimes changed rituals in undesirable ways. Therefore, this thesis delves into intentionally designing enabler and social actor technologies for rituals following a research through design approach, both in terms of the design process (P3) and outcomes (P4, P5). Three specific cases were chosen to cover the broad spectrum of rituals, from less (P4, P5) to more complex (P2, P3), prescribed (P2, P3) to newly invented (P4, P5), social (P2, P3, P4) to individual (P5) and religious (P2, P3, P5) to secular (P4). As a result, this thesis demonstrates how specific design methods, such as provotyping, can suit the unique challenges of designing interactive technologies for rituals and presents the novel provotype God-I-Box (P3). In addition, this thesis presents a novel enabler technology, El Corazón (P4), and a novel social actor technology, the Blessing Companion (P5), both intentionally designed for rituals. Reflecting on these design cases, this thesis proposes two unique experiential qualities that can inspire the future design of interactive technologies for rituals: effort of use and uncontrollability. Overall, this thesis makes empirical, artefact, methodological, and theoretical contributions that lay the foundations for ritual research in HCI. Furthermore, it provides concrete tools for analysing and designing rituals with interactive technologies, including two classification schemes and two experiential qualities, contributing to academic understanding and practical application in HCI.

Thesis