Family Rituals 2.0 seeks to understand the challenges of working away from home from a sociological and specifically ethnographic perspective. It is an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council funded project with partners from Newcastle University and the Royal College of Art, University of the West of England and Bournemouth University.
We have designed five bespoke Ritual Machines for five real families who experience separation from home due to work — click to find out about each family and their machine:
The machines are playful and provocative; they are not solutions to the problem of absence from home, but rather a way of provoking conversation about the family's attitudes to home and work life. We identified existing domestic rituals by using cultural probes and interviews and created a bespoke machine that enables, extends or perturbs this during absence. Each machine typically lived with the family for a period of one month.
The machines were exhibited at the project's final show at the London Design Festival (September 2015). Three machines were displayed at the Science Gallery's HOME\SICK Show (May 2015) — watch the interview.
For an overview of the project read our exhibition publication:
Family Rituals 2.0 (
2015).
Jo-Anne Bichard, Paulina Yurman, David Chatting, David S. Kirk, Juliet Jain, Adele Ladkin and Marina Marouda. [HTML]
The following publications describe our work in greater detail:
Making Ritual Machines: The Mobile Phone as a Networked Material for Research Products (
2017).
David Chatting, David S. Kirk, Abigail C. Durrant, Chris Elsden, Paulina Yurman and Jo-Anne Bichard. Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. pp. 435-447. DOI: 10.1145/3025453.3025630
Ritual Machine IV: A Message in a Jam (
2017).
David Chatting, Paulina Yurman, Jo-Anne Bichard and David S. Kirk. CHI 2017 The Things of Design Research workshop. [PDF]
Ritual Machine V: Where are You? (
2017).
David Chatting, Paulina Yurman, David P. Green, Jo-Anne Bichard and David S. Kirk. RTD 2017. DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.4746958.v1
Ritual Machines I & II: Making Technology at Home (
2016).
David S. Kirk, David Chatting, Paulina Yurman and Jo-Anne Bichard. Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. pp. 2474-2486. DOI: 10.1145/2858036.2858424
Ritual Machine V: Where are You? (
2016).
David Chatting, David S. Kirk, Paulina Yurman and Jo-Anne Bichard. CHI 2016 Object Outcomes workshop. [PDF]
Designing for family phatic communication: a design critique approach (
2015).
David Chatting, David S. Kirk, Paulina Yurman and Jo-Anne Bichard. Proceedings of the 2015 British HCI Conference. pp. 175-183. DOI: 10.1145/2783446.2783566
Quotidian Ritual and Work-Life Balance: An Ethnography of Not Being There (
2014).
Jo-Anne Bichard, Paulina Yurman, David S. Kirk and David Chatting. Proceedings of EPIC 2014. pp. 163-178. DOI: 10.1111/1559-8918.01019 
