Artifacts and buildings for ritual purposes are familiar to antropologists and are recorded in archaeological history.  Perhaps today the design of ritualised objects has migrated from the social arena to consumption and mass-production where consumer products induce ritualised habits.  For example, it is possible to buy a wide variety of coffee makers for the home kitchen.  Each design encourages the consumer to adopt certain habits and each design confers a social status with the coffee cognascenti.  Coffee making becomes a ritualised performance.  Casting an eye beyond consumption, which itself is a ritual visit to the shopping complex or mall, there are designs that embrace ritual beyond the commodified time of industrial production.  These designs offer diverse expressions of ritual and different time experiences.

Bali offerings – Balinese culture is  renown for effortlessly weaving ritual into the tapestry of everyday life, so what could be a repetitive or banal activity is elevated to sensual, spiritual and relgious joy.  These individually crafted offerings celebrate life’s richness in their aesthetic composition of commonplace fruits and flowers.  Constructed using traditional skills these offerings remain unique to their maker.  Design in the context of each offering is ephemeral yet its rituals are socially and culturally durable and contribute to individual and community well-being.

The Draught by Pawel Grunert – serving as seating object and sculpture this artefact celebrates the qualities of the wicker (willow) rods which, by association, raise questions about our relationship to nature.  This is a chair for contemplation, reflection and dreaming.  It opens up the possibility of a daily ritual, a ‘time out’, a few moments of non-consumption in an electronic information free zone.

New Grange, Ireland – Just once a year at dawn on the Summer Solstice, this narrow passageway is flooded with sunlight and the heart of this burial chamber is briefly warmed.  This entire buried edifice is designed for a sublime ritual moment, a reminder of cycles of time made culturally less relevant by the commodification of time since the Rennaisance onwards.  Here is a sundial that only tells the time once a year.  Here is a deep experience by design.

Storytelling Pavillion, Cranbrook, USA by Dan Hoffman – Constructed of a simple wooden frame covered with shingles, this ovoid space offers a mini theatre for the art of aural tradition.  With the advent of the printing press and education of the masses to read, the telling of stories as a means to entertain and communicate history, tradition, and culture has faded.  Television, radio, movies and the internet provide our modern stories but they lack the intimacy of face-to-face contact and discourse.  Hoffman’s pavillion dedicates a space to the ritual of telling a story.  Inside this space there is complicity between the storyteller and the listeners, a closeness borne of knowing that the story and its telling happen once.  Next time the story is repeated the dynamics will shift, the story evolves, the pavillion reasunates to different people.

©2004, 2005 Alastair Fuad-Luke. All rights reserved.