Letting go

tl;dr: Preform a ritual of letting go (refer to Sas paper and discussion in class) and document your experiences. Alternative: Interview two or three people about their experiences of letting go. Talk with them about an ritual or practice they’ve used to let go of the past. Time Limit: 2 hours

Brief and Goals

In this module, we’ll explore the relationship between material artefacts, embodied practices that allow us to express and transform grief, trauma and anguish and ubiquitous computing.

In this exercise, you’ll explore firsthand the practices of divestment explored by Corina Sas in her work: ‘Designing personal grief rituals’ and ‘Design for Rituals of Letting Go’ (see figure.) In this study, they work with 12 psychotherapists to understand how they use rituals of letting go to overcome loss. The participants describe in detail the aspects of rituals and practices around material artefacts that are successful in helping to let of and move on from personal tragedy, trauma, grief and loss. These embodied therapies were found to belong to three broad categories

• Open disposal: Rituals that use the metaphor of release often with air or water to symbolise letting go; e.g. scattering in the wind, drifting away in water;
• Covert disposal: A slower disposal that involves decomposition/decay/dissolution and potentially transformation; e.g. burying a symbolic object in the ground;
• Dynamic disposal: A much more active disposal that centers on destruction and deconstruction; e.g. burning letters or gifts, cutting or tearing photos.

In exploring these rituals, they note: “people increasingly have digital possessions, and that the act of deletion does not offer the same cathartic sense of release as disposal of material artifacts.” So, how might we bridge the gap between the resonance of embodied practices with material objects with deletion of digital content through new smart and connected devices?

As inspiration for your investigation of digital forgetting, this exericse will ask you to enact one of these embodied therapeutic rituals for moving on and letting go. Choose a one of the method of disposal discussed by Sas, Whittaker & Zimmerman and perform it on a symbolic object of your past that you’d like to forget.

Brief: Experiment with divesting memories by preforming a ritual of letting go (refer to Sas paper and discussion in class) and document your experiences.

Alternative: If you find this too personal an exercise or you would prefer not to share your experiences, you’re welcome to interview two or three people about their experiences of ‘letting go’. Talk with them about a ritual or practices they’ve used to move on from their past.

Note This is a warmup exercise and you should spend around 2 hours on this exercise.

Learning Objectives

As part of this exercise you will be asked to:

• Develop your awareness of how embodied cognition plays a role in divesting memories and the past;
• Explore the kinds of experiences that someone might want to let go of by examining yourself;
• Examine the rituals and practices that might inspire new digital interactions to support forgetting.

Deliverables

You are asked to deliver three things for this warm up exercise:

1. Ritual: Document your experience with a ritual for letting go.
2. Narrative: A short description of the manner in which you approached the project, the process you followed, the strategies you used to ‘let go’ and your response to it.
3. Reflection: A reflection on outcome, comparison to the Sas, Whittaker & Zimmerman paper discussed in class, and how this might inform your investigation this module.

The narrative and reflection should be approx 150-200 words (max.)

Share your outcomes as a post on the #projects channel of on Slack.