The Power of Rituals
I am excited to share the latest post for our ‘Connecting the Dots,’ blog series. The series attempts to connect the dots between disparate experiences, events, and phenomena to demonstrate the importance of human-centered design. The lessons learned by these connections will enable improved program design, especially for organizations striving to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Today, I’ll write about how incorporating old and new rituals in service programs can lead to increased adoption and, thus, help NGOs boost the outcome of their programs.
All societies have powerful drivers, named rituals and traditions. If we incorporate specific rituals into program redesigns, we can increase the design and program’s ‘stickability’ as it will naturally adapt to the beneficiaries’ culture and way of life.
An example of a powerful societal driver is the instinct to ‘leave no one behind’ during extreme events. This driver was evident at the start of the collective human experience: Margaret Mead links the beginning of civilization to a human being who recovered from a broken leg thanks to the care of the group. She explains that animals don’t survive in the wild long enough for a broken leg to heal, and, thus, they die. As such we mark the beginning of civilization when we were developed and were able to fulfill our instinct to leave no-one behind. Currently, “Leave No One Behind” is Principle Two of the UN Universal Values. These Universal Values are key to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals: we’re all in this together and only together we can design and implement solutions.
Nevertheless, even if the “leave no-one behind” concept is inclusive and universal in nature, it still needs to adapt to the context and situation of the matter we are designing to solve. The “no size fits all” has been widely used when implementing development projects. And the same goes for Human-Centered Design services. The best designed projects are those thought within strict constraints and goals. On the one hand, if we are talking about a school building, the leave no-one behind is mostly about accessibility: make it wheelchair or baby carriage friendly and then everyone will have access to it, no matter their mobility. On the other hand, if we are designing for inclusive education, our extremes probably include mobility constraints, but also other physical and psychical differences have to be accommodated in the learning path. So the “leave no-one behind” will have different outcomes in order to be truly universal.
And what if we add another layer of complexity? Besides the context, we can take into account societal norms and traditions. According to Dr. Laurie Santos’ podcast, The Happiness Lab, rituals can have a calming effect. For example, athletes and other performers follow rituals to focus and calm down before a race or a show. Some of these rituals have been present in our societies for generations: Hygge, the Scandinavian tradition of creating warmth in the winter. Other practices and traditions evolved with the times. For example, Roman mythology traditions and Gods were inspired by Greek ones. And others are purposely invented rituals when dealing with tough times or helping us stick to a diet by creating practices around cooking and eating food differently. We must not forget that even the oldest tradition was designed at some point, we’ve just lost track of that moment.
Therefore, if humans have transformed and created new rituals and habits across time, and there is evidence of the good effects on us, then why not incorporate these rituals into our designs? With a powerful co-creation session, we can learn about rituals related to the program we are redesigning to incorporate them into the experience. One example could be adapting the schedule to have an important milestone in the program coincide with a big local celebration. Another option would be “inventing” a new ritual similar to other local conventions and tightening milestones to those newly created rituals.
From Design Sapient, we are committed to teaming up with local NGO employees and the beneficiaries of the services to harness specific local traditions, habits, and rituals and anchor the redesigned services to their daily lives. This will make these programs easier to stick to and more relatable to the beneficiaries’ daily lives. During her 2014 HeforShe campaign kick-off, activist Emma Watson said, "If not me, who? If not now, when?”. Schedule a prospective call with us.
Image credits: "Stacked rocks" by jjackowski is licensed with CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/
