We talked about how rituals are a systems design tool at the 9th Relating Systems thinking and Design Conference. You can watch our talk or read the paper we wrote.

Summary
Ritual is a lost technology of being. We propose that co-designed rituals are a way for people to consciously identify and navigate their relationships to the systems they are embedded in, and to construct or reshape selves to seek well-being.

Using experiences from a toolkit we have created to support the design of secular rituals, we show that making rituals designable creates agency for people trying to cope with intractable situations. We further show how the process of co-designing and preparing for rituals is itself a large part of dealing with challenging situations, and pose questions on how this approach may be replicated in more formal systems change and organizational contexts.

What did we learn?
Studies of ritual in the academic literature almost always analyse rituals after they have been found to exist, and rarely do they discuss what designers and facilitators experience when creating the rituals. Our action research produced insights into this aspect of rituals, and these insights further support the proposition that rituals can be used as a systems design tool.

Three core insights are pertinent to this paper: that co-designing rituals generates meaning, the act of designing rituals reveals the system, and the ritual design process shapes the designer and their understanding of their self, their world, and their relationships.

Arvind was recently interviewed on the Informed Life podcast, and we got to talk about the intentions and background to this project, and how we see this adapting to the world of the pandemic. Listen to the podcast or read the transcript here.

The 2019-nCoV virus is here and it’s likely to be an ongoing presence in our lives for a year, perhaps two. There’s even a small chance it will be a permanent feature in the long term if it turns out that antibodies for this virus don’t last in the bloodstream.

This is not a change we were prepared for, and we weren’t prepared for how much of our world and daily lives it would affect. We certainly weren’t prepared for the speed at which all this change would hit us.

We don’t know where this is going go lead… what the fate of the economy is, who we might lose to this disease, and what hopes may have to be abandoned. We don’t have a clear narrative of our lives any more. We realized that the narratives we thought were solid and stable were paper thin wrapping around a vast ocean of chaos. We are torn between turning towards society and mutual solidarity, and doing everything we can to keep our jobs.

We’re isolated, and afraid, and stressed out. We feel regretful for the things we should have done, and desperate for things to do back to the way they were. Sometimes we don’t even know if our feelings are valid or justified. It’s overwhelming.

This is a moment of great meaning.

And we are asked to make sense of all this ourselves… to find ways to cope… to redesign the airplane while it’s flying and on fire.

Of course we are overwhelmed. But we are not powerless.

In the video above, Italians dealing with an intense outbreak send “messages from the future” as a way to feel useful to other people in the world. It is a purposeful, symbolic, and healing act.

They have performed a ritual.

Rituals are an effective solution for this moment because they allow you to hold space for processing emotions. They are a nameable container: they give you a way to point at a situation clearly and give you permission to express how you feel about it. They allow you to go through that process with others and provide a clear structure for everyone who participates. They help you to invoke stories and ideas that are meaningful to you, and construct new stories that help you move through life. (Here’s more about how rituals work.)

Rituals are technologies of being — you use them to craft a new you and a new us. Rituals are a machine for time travel — they let you step out of the moment, look at it from afar, and then come back in to the stream. By engaging in ritual, you assert your agency. Rituals make heroes of us all.

At the Ritual Design Toolkit project, we think you too can build a coping strategy can using 4 kinds of rituals, each to help with different points in time. Doubtless these aren’t the only kinds of rituals you may feel called to create during the pandemic, but we’re offering them as a useful starting point.

Accepting the new reality

If you are struggling with understanding what all of this means, or you have people in your life who are in denial, then what you need is a way to come to terms with the current reality.

You’ll likely want to mourn lost possibilities and abandoned plans. You’ll want to look for things to aim for, and things to sustain you. Perhaps all you need is to let go of the past, and shore up your will to create a new future.

You need a ritual you can do to go through this process of acceptance. As we learn new things about this pandemic and how long it might last and what it will affect, you may have to go through this ritual again and again. Every time we go into a lockdown you may need recourse to this ritual.

Adjusting to isolation

You’ve accepted that this your reality now and you’ve mourned what you’ve lost. You’re now in isolation or other measures needed for maintaining public health, and you’ve lost your usual sources of emotional satisfaction.

You’ll need to cultivate new behaviors, and you’ll need some scaffolding to build them on.

You need a habitual ritual you can do everyday (or even more often).

Preparing for another viral season

In a terrible future where a vaccine is found but is only effective for a limited period of time, this coronavirus is going to be like the flu, only much more impactful. Once or twice a year we will need to collectively gird our loins for a COVID season, revive lapsed behaviors and reinforce a sense of solidarity.

You’ll need a seasonal ritual, perhaps one each to mark the beginning and end of the season.

Celebrating the pandemic’s end

Hopefully, we do find a vaccine and perhaps even a cure for this. Hopefully we contain the spread of this disease and new infections stop. It will have been a long haul. It will have been very difficult for us to go without the things we took for granted for most of our lives — hanging out with friends and family, travel for fun, physical touch, concerts…

It will be the longest collective holding of breath we have seen in generations.

We will want a way to let go of that breath. We will need closure.

We will need a ritual, symbolic act to mark that moment, and if we are wise we will prepare one beforehand.

“How can I design these rituals?”

We’re glad you asked. Head on over to the toolkit website. There, you will find an overview of the toolkit (free to download and use) and a suggested design process to follow. If you’re interested, there’s some background reading.

If you do end up designing a ritual or few, we’d love to hear from you. If you’d like some support in designing a ritual, please reach out. It would be wonderful to create with you.

Thank you for your attention, and may you survive and thrive in these strange times.

We have just got back from hosting a popup studio at Burning Man, and it was a deeply fulfilling and inspiring experience.

Who are we?

We are Adam Menter and Arvind Venkataramani, and we are creators of an open source toolkit for designing secular rituals. Our purpose is to democratize rituals.

We set ourselves up near the Temple…

Originally, we had intended on setting up a portable studio in different parts of the playa every day, but having scouted out the location near the temple we realized it was a really good location. Our purpose aligns well with the Temple’s: provide support for people going through emotionally challenging situations.

The studio consisted of a shade structure in which we set up camp chairs and tables. This gave us a space for hosting conversations, and possibly entering into design if appropriate.

As a happy accident, it turns out that there is no shade structure close to the Temple, so people were drawn to us just because they wanted shade in which to process what they had done or seen at the temple. Some portion of these were intrigued by rituals, or by one of the words on the sign: “family, work, love, community, suffering, growth, healing, renewal”, and came in to talk with us.

Here are some of their stories

• A person was separating from their partner at the same time as they were having a child together, because they didn’t want to have children but had suppressed their needs until they faced the reality of being a parent. We helped him reflect on and see his situation with clarity.
• A family was integrating the loss of a grandfather who’d recently died, and who had wanted to be at Burning Man. They were finding ways to celebrate his life, and keep his spirit with them on the playa and in the life of their child. We gave them space and tools to help deepen a celebration they’d already planned, animating & celebrating his spirit through food.
• Two people whose deeper relationship is only able to fully express itself at Burning Man were looking for ways to carry the “magic of the playa” into their lives, individually and together. We helped them see and work through the dynamics that are keeping the relationship stuck, and also set intentions to craft some experiences at Burning Man to celebrate their time together.

• A person dropped in because they needed a space to process the emotions they had absorbed by spending time in the Temple, and were feeling overwhelmed and didn’t exactly know why. We helped them process, and then designed a small ritual to help them achieve closure and find calm.
• A person had recently started making big changes in their life that their parents were scared of and reacting badly to. They wondered what they could do about it. We helped them frame the situation, and identified a few habits they could put in place to make progress on this.
• A couple were converting their relationship to trans-continental long-distance, and this was beginning at Burning Man. They had different ways of communicating, solving problems, and getting their needs met. We helped create a communication pattern that would meet both of their needs, and identified a way for them to prototype it on the playa.
• A person was constantly second-guessing their decisions. We helped them identify the root of the behavior, and the tensions that were shaping it. We helped them imagine other possibilities, and they came up with mantra they could say to themselves to help deal with the instinct to second-guess. We made a bracelet with the mantra on it for them to wear as a reminder.

These were vulnerable, sometimes scary, and often painful conversations. We found that it took a lot of mental and emotional energy to host these.

“You’ve transformed my week at Burning Man”

We only had the studio running for a few hours in the late morning for a couple of days (more on this later.) The first day, we had so many people come by (and at such constant rates) that it became clear to us that there is a real need in the community — and perhaps the world — for this kind of thing.

So we rapidly prototyped a self-service version.

The table had these instructions on it:

Ring the bell.

You’ve begun a ritual experience at Burning Man.

Open the box, and select a card that speaks to you. Take this card with you, and try to explore the intention written on it as you wander the playa. Bring this card back when you are done.

Reflect on your experience. What did you receive or realize?

While we don’t know exactly how many people dropped by, one person did return a card to us the next day. We didn’t get to talk with them much, so we don’t have a rich description of their experience. We did bump into a small group that was looking for a space to design a ritual of their own, and they found our space just as they left the Temple.

Insights

This work is about more than rituals

We noticed a few different kinds of outcomes from people engaging with us:

1. just needing a space for processing and unpacking, with no definite outcome
2. identification of beliefs or behaviors to create or change, and designing tools for that (including small, quick, self-initiated rituals)
3. designing a ritual, perhaps to be experienced on the fly

It seems that at the heart of this work is holding space for people, and giving of oneself through listening and facilitation. This suggests a broader range of processing experiences adjacent to ritual design could also be made present literally adjacent in a studio space.

There is clearly also a symbolic relationship between this space and the Temple. Perhaps we will find a way to work with the Guardians or the Temple itself. At any rate, there is a clear need for a shade structure near the Temple where people can process and reflect, aided or otherwise.

We need to think about a simple entry/starting point for the ritual design process

Both at Burning Man and in other settings, we found the above structure to be an excellent introductory description of what distinguishes a ritual from a normal action or experience. What this three-circles image does well is to introduce the idea of liminal/ritual vs mundane/world time, and the idea of pathways and transitions. Using Burning Man itself as an example to illustrate our conception of rituals and ritual spaces, we found the most useful learning for people was that they had to pay attention to the opening and closing transitions of any ritual they design.

We also found that the intent cards are an excellent entry point for a variety of purposes — they have been very useful in supporting dialogue and helping people unpack and reflect. However, if this becomes their primary purpose, we will have to expand the intents framework (probably adding categories), and change the language to be more broadly accessible and usable outside a ritual design context. In any case, there is clearly scope for refining the language.

There are a range of studio types we can run

We were able to get the entire studio to fold down and pack into a bike trailer, though we ended up bringing a few more supplies in a second trip.

This was great for a monitored setup, where someone was on hand at all times to make sure everything was in place and not getting blown over by the wind onto the playa. It was not so great for an unmonitored setup, with risk of breakage and an inability to secure items on the table. Were we to do this again, we would like to set up something more permanent and stable. Perhaps something like this lovely contemplation space that also shared the playa with us:

We did commit an error: we did not realize that we could have registered our art-work on-playa, so we returned Thursday morning to find our studio had been very cleanly and professionally removed by one of the BRC organizations! Oops! The playa giveth and the playa taketh away.

But also in true playa fashion it turns out it was handed over to the Temple Guardians, and perhaps it can be re-used next year. At least we know much more about how Burning Man works and how to set things up more sustainably next year.

Join us!

This experience showed that there is a lot opportunity for running popup studios in our own environments. Perhaps we could show up at neighborhood parks or festivals in the Bay Area.

We’d love to have more people able to use the tools to facilitate these sessions. If this sounds interesting, please get in touch!

And perhaps we’ll see you next year on the playa…

Gratitude

Thanks to Sparkadia for hosting us on very short notice and helping Adam and Arvind become playa ready (this was Arvind’s first time and Adam’s second after a gap of a decade). We would not have made it to the playa without them.

Thanks to each person who came by, talked with us, hung out in the space, and shared of their deep and vulnerable thoughts and selves. We are blessed to have had so many chances to see humanity in all its fragility and beauty.

“How can I learn more about this work?”

We’re glad you asked. Head on over to the toolkit website. There, you will find an overview of the toolkit (free to download and use) and a suggested design process to follow. If you’re interested, there’s some background reading.

If you do end up designing a ritual or few, we’d love to hear from you. If you’d like some support in designing a ritual, please reach out. It would be wonderful to create with you.