We spend most of our time at home now, and you probably know the intricacies of your home like the back of your hand.

The nuances and imperfections of a place are often what make it so delightful and engaging - even the mundane like a crack on the wall can give character to a space.

Imperfections are also opportunities for designers to critique the environment: to exaggerate, distort, manipulate, or alter an existing condition into something new and playful. Through the slightest material change in the environment, design can modify the narrative of a place.

This week, we will transform our home spaces through elements of delight, play, wonder, and surprise.

Part 1: Identify one experience, one ritual, and one physical characteristic of your home life, and note them in your sketchbook or on a piece of paper. You may have to write down a couple of ideas before you find one that you like best.

Experience: A direct observation or participation in an event. For example: eating your dad’s mac & cheese, sinking into the softness of your couch, smelling the magnolia tree blooming in your garden, hearing your sister’s zoom meeting from the other room.

Ritual: An act or series of acts regularly repeated in an ongoing manner. For example: calling grandma every Sunday, brushing your teeth every morning, setting the table for dinner every night, eating pancakes every Saturday morning, or watching cartoons with your little brother after school time is over.

Object/Physical Characteristic: A distinguishing trait, quality, or property. For example: the crack in your ceiling that you never noticed before, how you can hear your mom’s zoom calls through the air vent in your room, the one wobbly leg on your desk.  

Part 2: Draw a sketch for one experience, ritual, and object you’ve chosen. For the experience and ritual, it may be helpful to draw a storyboard, or a couple of frames that show that ritual at different stages.                                                                                  

Part 3: Re-imagine the experience, ritual, and object. Some prompts for that brainstorming are:

• What brings you delight? Can you incorporate that into your object/ritual/experience?
• How can you add an element of surprise?
• Can you make it more playful or fun?
• How can you emphasize what you already enjoy?
• Can you game-ify it?
• Can you make it more communal (able to be used by multiple people simultaneously)?
• Can you add a whimsical element to make people smile?
• Can you add an element that is comforting or calming?

Write down a couple of ideas for each.

Part 4: For your favorite ideas, draw a sketch of how you would create an intervention in the original experience, ritual, and object. Again, a storyboard might be useful here.

Deliverable:

For each category (experience, ritual, object) make a post in your Virtual Learning Portfolio with the:

1. Title of the experience/ritual/object
2. Sketch of that thing as it is
3. Sketch of your imagined intervention, and what it is intended to do.