In “The Psychology of Rituals: An Integrative Review and Process-Based Framework,” Hobson and colleagues (2018) review research on how rituals influence people’s emotions, performance, and social connections. They describe rituals as structured sequences of actions that carry symbolic meaning and include elements without an obvious practical connection to their intended outcome. Their framework distinguishes between “bottom-up” processes (emerge from performing physical actions) and “top-down” processes (which involve expectations and interpretations). For example, repeating a ordered sequence can direct attention, while the meaning attached to that sequence itself can amplify its significant. The article provides a framework for understanding ritual’s psychological effects and reinds us that ritual do not always produces the same response.
This framework helps me think more carefully about the opening of my installation. I have been considering asking visitors a personal question, guiding their breathing, and inviting them to interact with a machine through their gaze. These actions could establish expectations before the machine performs its apparent mind-reading. For example, following a moving light could be presented as eye-tracking calibration or as a way of establishing a connection with the machine. I am interested in how the same action might feel different depending on its timing, language, and presentation. This gives me a more specific design question: how does an ordinary interface instruction become a meaningful ritual? I want to develop the physical sequence and the accompanying script together, paying attention to pauses, repetition, and the visitor’s role. If I later study participants’ responses, I would also want to distinguish between feeling calm, feeling personally understood, and believing that the machine has special knowledge, and also ask me to think about: how to manipulate those variates in former interaction design. A change in physiological signals alone would not tell me which interpretation a visitor experienced.
This week, I made limited progress, but I browsed examples of related projects and began drafting the visual design for my installation. I mainly considered what kinds of data I could collect and how I could process or transform them within the experience. I am still deciding whether eye-tracking or other physiological signals would best support the interaction. This also made me think about how the interface could turn a bodily signal into something that feels like a personal reading. Next week, I plan to refine the visual draft and map out one possible interaction, identifying what data it would need, how the system would interpret that data, and what the visitor would see.
Reference
Hobson, N. M., Schroeder, J., Risen, J. L., Xygalatas, D., & Inzlicht, M. (2018). The psychology of rituals: An integrative review and process-based framework. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 22(3), 260–284. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868317734944