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Designing Compassion in Dharamshala

In November 2018, I attended the Compassion and Ethics Summit with his holiness Dalai Lama. During the three-day-summit, I led a short ritual design session with the summit participants. Here are some highlights from this one of a kind summit.

The participants were from diverse backgrounds — including museum leaders, academics, artists, consultants, and designers. They were intentionally invited from different disciplines and walks-of-life to spark creative conversations. The overall theme was finding new and alternative ways to express compassion and ethics in our lives.

Meeting with Dalai Lama

The Dalai Lama’s Talk took people to an emotional journey from happiness to sadness to intrigue to reflection.

We met Dalai Lama on a sunny, chilly Monday morning after a serene walk from our hotel to the complex where Dalai Lama lives. We were around 30 people. When we got to the meeting, we waited for him to finish his earlier meeting. People enjoyed this waiting time with silence and small conversations. It was also a mental preparation time for most of us, as we all left our smart phones behind, taking in the serene atmosphere. When he finally arrived, people’s silence was broken by bows and excitement.

In our meeting, he spoke to us in a journey: taking us from the beginnings of the world (Big Bang theory) to the current times (climate change) with a strong sense of hope for a better world. I drew a map of his talk [see my drawing above] to show the emotional journey through happiness, sadness, awe, hope, and excitement.

And themes emerged from the meeting, and our group’s debrief afterwards. One big theme was the concept of oneness within the world’s pluralism, and another was the warmth of the mind.

On oneness

As the participants come from different faith traditions, there was this strong emphasis on oneness — the oneness of humanity that is built around pluralism of seven billion people. Sufis call this oneness Vahdet-i Vucud, African traditions call this Ubuntu. Dalai Lama emphasized the need to bring this quality through the concept of secular ethics, which relies on common sense and scientific grounding.

On Warmth of Mind

The warmth of the mind was another intriguing concept. Dalai Lama mentioned that there was not a direct concept of warm-heartedness in the Tibetan language. Warm-heartedness is about motivation. It’s the beginning point. The real challenge is about the warmth of the mind, which is about reframing and redirecting the emotions with a positive mind and attitude. He concluded that with the mind (human intelligence) and heart together, you can get to infinite compassion.

We were impressed by his ability to balance humor and reverence, aspiration and practicality. After the event, we were charged with some kind of positive energy. At Ritual Design Lab, we call this the je ne sais quoi aspect of a ritualistic gathering — where there is an unexplainable emotional energy emerges from the gathering. Randall Collins call this the effervescence effect of rituals.

Designing Rituals for Compassionate Lives

When asked to contribute to the Compassion Summit, we first thought about running an introductory session around rituals. This idea lingered with us for a while. One day, one of us was attending a circuit-training at the gym, and then he had this spark. What if we can practice compassion muscles as if we work out at a gym?

This led us to propose the initial vision for the workshop: designing compassion stations — similar to a circuit-training- for people to perform rituals at a museum setting. We even called it a compassion gym. The journey to the compassionate lives are three-fold, noticing suffering, feeling empathetic concern, and compassionate responding.

To scaffold this vision, the design challenge was set around how to live more compassionate lives at home, work, and third places. The teams mostly picked work context and prototyped ritual concepts. They picked emotional low points such as returning to work after loss of a close relative. One team performed their mourning ritual where team members recognize the suffering and the loss of their teammate with symbolic acts like the release of balloons.

Communication ritual to create a sense of community between engineering and art students

Compassion gym is still a work-in-progress concept. As Ritual Design Lab, we will be running more experiments on an experienceable ritual station idea. One of our strongest inspirations on this is Exploratorium’s Science of the Sharing exhibition where they managed to prototype social interactions. The idea in Sciences of the Sharing is that our social interactions have a mechanics and can be designed similar to a science experiment.

To recap, the conversations from Dalai Lama and the ritual design sessions get us inspired in multiple ways:

The size and complexity of compassion challenges don’t matter. What matters is the effort — to change things from an existing state for a better state.
When you have this agency to make things better, it’s about reframing the existing challenge, and work with mind and heart together.
Mind and heart are not discrete states of existence. They work in a continuum, with fluidity.
Rituals can be one of the many toolkits to help people get concrete about compassion.

In the following post, we will highlight several compassion-oriented mindsets and toolkits that the Summit participants shared with the group. These tools invite people to get concrete about empathy and compassion. For designers, they can be exercises and examples for empathy in action, and experience design.

This post is originally published in our Ritual Design Medium publication. Visit to read the other two follow-up posts.

Introducing Ritual Design: meaning, purpose, and behavior change

Part 1 of a multi-part series on Ritual Design.

Hello, welcome to this post.

Take a moment to take a deep breath three times.

Now, make a wish for tomorrow.

Write the wish down on scratch paper (or a virtual note).

Now close the note, and say your wish aloud three times while you do.

Welcome to ritual design — where we create new small moments to spark something meaningful with our target users. We believe in the power of rituals both as a tool and as an end-goal for practitioners (designers, technologists, and beyond) who are trying to engage their users in lively, deep ways.

We (Kursat Ozenc and Margaret Hagan) have been exploring how rituals can intersect with design work. In this multi-part series, we introduce a ritual design framework for practitioners working in different product/service genres.

Our wall of sketches about how Rituals and Design connect — and how we can make it into a framework for designers and technologists to use.

In this first part, we begin with why ritual design is important — especially for behavior and organizational design, and what the existing examples are out there of ritual-oriented designs.

In coming posts, we will report on two ritual design pop-up classes (workshops) we ran with over 70 Stanford students at the Stanford d.school. Finally, we will dive into how designers can craft and use rituals in their process, with a framework of ritual mechanics. We will conclude our series with the future directions/work that need to be considered for better meaning-making futures.

What do we mean with the word ritual?

A Ritual is an act done in a particular situation and in the same way each time, that they have imbued with symbolism and meaning.

In its everyday life use, it’s very common that people use ‘rituals’ interchangeably with ‘routines’. But there is an important difference: one of them makes meaning, the other doesn’t. This meaning could be non-obvious, even illogical or irrational, to an outsider observing the ritual in practice. Rituals don’t need to be instrumental, they just need to provide the ritual-performer with a spark of meaning.

The purpose of a ritual can vary. It could help us to transition from one stage in life to another — like a graduation ceremony, a wedding, a baptism, or a funeral. It could solidify our belonging in a community or interest group — like in a football game, a hackathon, or a sorority.

Ritual at its core helps us to carve special moments of our routine, and sparks of meaning in what could be repetitive, dull everyday lives.

We’ve observed two main genres of rituals. First are rituals with a small letter “r”. These rituals are nimble, casual, and interpersonal. Think of your family’s Sunday morning breakfast, or your obsessive coffee ritual. These would be everyday routines, except they carry more meaning and symbolism.

The second genre is Rituals with a capital letter “R”. These rituals are majestic in their volume and stance. Religious rituals and sports events are in this category. These big-R Rituals are more coordinated, formalized, and large-scale. This distinction comes in important as we turn to the design of rituals.

Rituals have many values, usually including some combination of the following.

1) Community. When you practice a ritual that others have practiced before you — or that others are practicing at the same time as you — the actions make you feel connected to them. It takes you out of yourself and makes you part of a larger whole

2) Awareness & Intentionality. One of the main components of a ritual — that distinguishes it from a habit, a routine, or another repeated action — is that it involves your consciousness that something special is happening. It turns a special part of your brain on. You become more aware of what you are doing, and more intentional about what the meaning and symbolism of your actions are. This awareness breaks you away from thoughtlessness, repetition, monotony — it ideally makes you more tuned into higher meanings.

3) Spirituality. Ritual can call in meanings, magic, and the unexplainable. Ritual can invoke things that are not entirely rational, and pull out emotions that can best be described as spiritual. You may feel connected to higher forces, that are not normal & human.

Scoping out Ritual Design

Ritual design is a service-oriented experience design. It stands unique from a generic design process with a focus on symbols, values, narratives, and meaning.

When practicing Ritual Design, you try to tap into the non-functional, non-obvious, and emotional. Rather than the transactional and the logical, assuming a neat line between the user’s actions and outcomes, it’s about making a service journey that has twists, serendipity, and surprises.

When we talk about ritual design, we mean:

Using the design process to create new rituals in our lives (whether it’s totally new actions/products, or taking an existing routine or habit and bumping it up into the world of rituals)
Taking existing or historical rituals to guide the design of new products and services (like, studying how a fire god ritual exists, and then using its props and interactions to create new kinds of modern things)
Designing ways to support our existing or lost rituals, to make the rituals we have more livable and better (like how to help us pray & meditate, how to help us keep up our family holidays)

We can think of Ritual Design in two main phases: the discovery and design phases. Ritual De is first of all the practice of discovering moments in people’s lives that are ripe for bringing meaning and values into their actions. It’s also about understanding their ‘ritual history and profile’ — what other kinds of rituals they have experience with, that carry meaning for them, and that could be remixed into new experiences.

Once discovered, it’s about designing novel interventions to make rituals for them, to bring meaning through interactions. In the design phase, it’s about crafting an arc of experiences, with at least one magical spark, that makes the experience stick as a ritual — something with meaning, that is not ‘ordinary’, that links into the user’s narrative about herself and her values.

When we practice Ritual Design, it matters whether we’re focused on small-r rituals or big-R Rituals. We’ve found that Ritual Design is situated more in the small-r genre, but it can draw inspiration from the majestic big-R Rituals.

For small-letter ritual design, a designer can either design a ritual or ritualize a service or product. A bedtime ritual, and a pre-race ritual can be good examples for designing of a ritual. We’ll explore more examples later on in the piece — first, though, we link Ritual Design into design for behavior change.

Ritual design is essential in behavior change, adding narrative and purpose

Behavior change (both for people and for organizations) is increasingly the mission of designers, social scientists, and software developers. Our guiding question is how can we help people live lives that are healthier, wiser, and more meaningful?

We propose that rituals are a core element in spurring behavior change and making it stick. We’ve been developing a ritual design framework that spells out how we can craft better products and services, that help people live the lives that they aspire towards, with values and satisfaction.

Behavior change models focus on motivation, ability, triggers, and feedback loops. These are the materials they use, to get people focused on goals and following through with achieving them.

Design communities are hungry and eager to apply these models into the context that they are active, like in healthcare, financial wellness, mental well-being, etc. Behavior change models are useful in the way that they give people tangible hooks to grasp the intangible behavior landscape.

However, the bigger picture question of why the person should change a certain behavior or get motivated is usually overlooked. In order to follow through a behavior change, the person needs to believe in a story and have a purpose. Ritual (with its mechanics) can provide the user with both the story and purpose necessary to make behavior change work.

How does ritual provide narrative and a purpose?

Narrative is in every ritual’s DNA. By marking a special moment in people’s daily lives, ritual is built upon a story — whether an epic or a short one. Such a story is a manifestation of people’s beliefs, and values.

A ritual marks an event where the ordinary is suspended for a certain time, and a magic moment occurs, giving the person a perspective and a narrative about how their life is meaningful. While doing so, she either identifies herself with a story that’s told before, or creates her own story. In the journey to changing a behavior, she is rewriting part of her life narrative — either a small or a major part.

Ritual can be a way to consciously alter your actions and daily routines. If you want to change how you act and think, ritualizing new modes of action and thought can make them more sticky. Ritual will invoke something special and also giving a narrative flow to your behavior change efforts.

Think of pre-race rituals for people who are training for an athletic event, like a triathloner. She is redefining part of her life narrative, and telling the story that she is now a different kind of person who is persevering and self-disciplined. To manifest this life story, she needs an instance of this story in her life. Ritual is that manifestation of her belief and story.

Ritual design can complement the behavioral design approaches by providing the deeper dimensions of purpose, belief, and life narratives that can help a person to follow through a behavior change.

The Ritual Design Landscape today

To see the power of rituals in behavior change (and beyond), there is a small but growing set of examples of rituals in action. We lay them out here in a few categories.

1. Design a product or service to create a ritual. In the behavior change space, we see some new products that specifically try to get the users to create rituals to reinforce healthier, wiser behaviors.

For example, in the personal wellness space, Fabulous is the closest one that leverages the power of rituals. In the app, there’s an overarching elite athlete narrative — you can become the best, healthiest, most powerful version of yourself. To be part of that narrative, the app asks you to set regular daily rituals for yourself, and then guides you through them each day along with special music and interactions.

2. Ritualize a product/service experience. Another category of ritual design efforts are about using ritual elements to improve a certain product or service, and bring meaning and special work unto them.

Apple products, for instance, have this ritualization with its meticulously designed packaging. When we open an Apple product out of its original packaging, it reminds of us of elaborate gift rituals, as well as the organization of Japanese bento. (For Zen inspired design, check Kenji Ekuan).

Jony Ives, Apple’s design guru, explicitly reported that they crafted opening rituals for when customers first met their product — to make this meeting feel like a special, momentous occasion.

“I love the process of unpacking something. You design a ritual of unpacking to make the product feel special. Packaging can be theatre, it can create a story.” — Jony Ives, in Walter Isaacson’s biography Steve Jobs

Anything related to coffee and coffee making has been a ritualized experience. In this specific example, the designer ritualizes the morning wake-up experience with an automated coffee maker connected to the alarm clock.

3. Support a Ritual through a product. Regarding the capital-R Ritual genre, a designer can design artifacts to support existing Rituals, or to choreograph these Rituals in better ways. The smart device Prayer Companion (below) designed by Gaver, et al. is a design for supporting the ritual of prayer. It gives nuns prayer prompts (people in need of prayer) across the Globe to support their daily prayers.

4. Choreographing big-R Rituals

More ambitiously, a designer can choreograph a big-R Ritual — defining the steps, people, and outcomes of how a large-scale Ritual will proceed.

A festival can be defined as a typical Ritual. This kind of ritual is a collective effort, requiring many moving parts including philosophical grounding, people management, content, logistics, and operations. A festival can be more like a happening, an event that marks a certain set of values, artistic expression, or principles. In that sense, it’s hard to design such a Ritual. And it’s hard to imagine a designer for such huge undertaking. The designer in this type of Ritual is more like a choreographer, a curator, or an organizer.

Think of Burning Man as a Ritual. It started our of a small ritual experience that its Chief Philosophical Officer had. Out of a need for catharsis, he (along with a group of people) burned a sculpture in Baker Beach, San Francisco. This “manifestation of a creative impulse” now is a festival with 70,000 people.

Burning Man is a modern day majestic Ritual.

Burning Man is inspirational with its co-creative spirit and core principlesdriving its formation. It grew out of rituals, and is choreographed in its current rituals.

This introductory piece gives a sense of how rituals can be useful in the design process, specifically for behavior change and for meaningful designs. We see three main kinds of ritual designs now: 1. Products that try to help people create new rituals, 2. Service flows and product designs that aspire to be rituals themselves, 3. Products that support existing rituals, and 4. Designing and choreographing large-scale Rituals.

We know that there are many other kinds of apps, tools, services, and organizations that could be tapping into the power of rituals, to make more engaging and meaningful experiences for their users.

In that vein, we led two large design workshops (aka pop-up classes) at Stanford d.school in 2015 to explore how to best use ritual design for behavior change in small, personal moments. We used these pop-ups to examine our hypotheses about ritual designs and to open up the space of what kinds of new ritual designs were possible.

In our upcoming posts, we’ll dive into the methods we used and the designs that were created. Stay tuned!

Legal Design Lab

I am an active contributor at the Stanford’s Legal Design Lab, which is a groundbreaking initiative based at Stanford Law School & d.school, working at the intersection of human-centered design, technology & law to build a new generation of legal products & services. Check out Legal Design Lab, and see what’s happening.

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Wise Messenger App Digital Development

Role: UX designer in partnership with Stanford Legal Design Lab
Challenge: How might we help litigants follow through their legal processes?
Concept: An SMS service with notification, RSVP use cases
Client, persona: Court admins and other staff, court litigants

Synopsis

For people going through the legal system, it’s a challenge to stay on top of all the deadlines and tasks. The procedure of a court case or getting lawyer’s advice is a good option and easy to find at sites as https://www.jnlawoffices.com/lawyer/.

If you miss an appointment, it can have very negative consequences — you can lose your rights, have decisions against you, and get penalized by the judge. This might mean huge fines to pay, losing your kids, losing your house, or having to go back and start the process over again.

We went through several design cycles with court professionals and users, and designed a text-based reminder system that would tell people what they’re expected to do, exactly when, where, and what to bring.

The goal is to reach people via SMS, so it is more likely they will open and see the information, and also stagger the messages so that people can plan beforehand and gradually get ready for their big day.

Proposed UX

Our Wise Messenger application is a blend of front-facing web application and mobile application.

The Web application lets the administrator use our proposed message content and schedules. We have created many standard templates, based on our design work and testing. The administrator can customize or edit these templates, or create new ones.

Once a link has been set up between the court’s case management system and our application, then court administrators can efficiently set up templates of messages.

For example, they can send automated reminders to all people who have filed for divorce, so that 45 days after filing, 90 days after filing, and 120 days after filing, they receive messages about what they should be doing and how to follow up on the process.

How it works

Existing state of the project

Wise Messenger is currently being piloted with three different courts, for different use cases. In Maryland, we are working with the Office of the Public Defender, to send automated reminders to criminal defendants out on bail — to make sure they come for their hearings and do not endanger their freedom, with a new warrant out for their arrest.

In Florida, we are working with legal service groups to create an RSVP screener for a new ‘mobile lawyer’ clinic. We have been working together with https://the-indexer.com/ to get this application running. We are currently requesting we are assigned extra help for this purpose. In Orange County, California, we are working with the court Self-Help Center to send reminders to all those who have filed for divorce, to follow up on the process.

IdeaPop

Role: Product owner, Wise Design LLC
Challenge: How might we help teams get better at brainstorming, idea generation?
Concept: IdeaPop is an inspiration app to spark creativity through prompts and capture design concepts.
Client: It’s for designers, developers, and anyone who wants to get creative.
Availability: Available at Apple’s Itunes store

Proposed UX

IdeaPop is an inspiration app to spark creativity and capture design concepts. It’s for designers, developers, and anyone who wants to get creative. It gives you prompts to make your brainstorming better. A product team gets together for brainstorming. They pop prompts in their workshop time and generate ideas together. Once they decide on an idea, they give a name, and capture, share or reuse it in the future. I elaborated on this a bit more at Air-senegal-international if you would like to give it a read.

Flow

Sketches

Screens

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Who is Who

Role: Designer, experiments for conversational apps
Challenge: How might we help SAP employees discover other experts within the company?
Concept: WhoisWho is an SMS based chatbot that responds users’ questions on their colleagues (office, expertise)
Persona: Employees
Availability: Concept design

Proposed UX

Communicating with other colleagues inside big corporate environment can be a tedious experience. We designed an SMS based chatbot to help employees discover their colleagues’ expertise, office location, etc. An employee can easily access the service by sending a text message to the WhoisWho bot.

Conversational Framework

Conversational Model

motion action polarity

Kenneth Burke in Nonsymbolic motion/symbolic action essay put action in a symbolic perspective. For Burke, action is symbolic, and action differentiated from motion when we name it. so it becomes and exists with the language (that is conventional and arbitrary.)

if action is symbolic, then what is a symbol? lets take the webster definition here: something that stands for or suggests something else by reason of relationship, association, convention, or accidental resemblance.

In this sense humanbeings act, things move. He crystallize his ideas with three axioms:

There can be motion without action.
There can be no action without motion.
But symbolic action is not reducible to terms of sheer motion, (symbolicity involves not just a difference of degree, but a motivational difference in kind). [p. 145]

at this point the answer to the question of who/what is acting is easy to grab: humanbeings. so how about the bees, or ants that have some signal systems, or a kind of language? he thinks that their primitive language capability is inborn, and animals can not talk about what they talk. he gives a funny cicero/dog example.

secondly how action takes place? Action takes place when we name our movements (take place) and objects around us. it is a kind of duplication. duplication is immitation, a representation matter. duplication is so basic to the relation between motion and symbolicity, nothing of a moment seems quite complete unless we have rounded things out by translation into symbols of some sort, either scientific, aesthetic, practical or ritualistic.[page 154]

so what kind of actions can we talk about? if action is symbolic, we can sort the actions like symbols: scientific, aesthetic, practical, ritualistic actions.

while he mentions Santayana’s realm of essence, he gives the idea of his ‘Self’. Self is a combination of person (symbolic action) and physiologial body (nonsymbolic motion). these two can interact in three ways: consistently (this therefore that), anthitetically (this however that) and ventitiously (this and that).

Burke -even stated that it is not a perfect match- can make such analogies with motion/action pair: matter/mind, matter/spirit, unconscious/conscious, matter/form, body/soul.

what kind of implications can we get from Burke’s perspective to design?

the motion/action(symbol) pair is an interesting touch. in every design project, designer should define his/her subject matter according to the problem. defining the subject matter corresponds to the action in Burke’s sense. But how can we define the design process from beginning to end with respect to this pair? Design process in Burkean terminology consists of a dynamic relation between action and motion. Form and how will it be use can be defined as symbolic action, whereas the matter and function as motion. but it is hard to define a precise line between action and motion.they re different in kind,but tightly related. motion/action can be duplication, imitation, implication. the attitude he mention corresponds to the context.

how about design as language? every artefact(graphic to environment) has got its own language. it should have its grammar(shape,motion), its narrative structure (scenario of use), and semantics(meaning).