Co-designing rituals for transitional times

This PhD research proposes to investigate how newly designed community rituals might provide a means of re-conceiving existing carbon-intense lifestyles and help to imagine alternative social futures that move beyond an anthropocentric perspective. By using a combined multi-sensory ethnographic and design approach, this research seeks to understand how ritualistic activity is meaningfully located within everyday life and how it might be possible to work with ritual as a design ‘medium’. Participatory design methods that explore the potential for ritual as a transformational tool within community settings will be developed, in order to create new forms of social interaction and/or systems that help facilitate a collective transition towards a more sustainable future.