Moving rituals: cross-cultural re-interpretation of modern daily life rituals

Within the scope of EU Erasmus Intensive Programs 2013, the aim of the project called 'Moving Rituals' was to re-interpret cultural rituals, together with the cultural dimensions of different communities, in the context of the design field. The notion of culture is understood to be continuously moving and changing, developing itself dynamically via the encounter between differences and similarities. The focus of the project was on rituals that play a significant part in everyday life and are formed and re-formed with the norms of modern daily life. In other words, the traditional structures evoked by the word ‘ritual’ - and taking ritual as a frozen entity in time and place - are being avoided. Accordingly, due to the understanding that takes culture as a dynamic content and form at the core of the project, the ritual approach was concentrated on how rituals have been changing with the norms of modern life and how new rituals are created due to the dynamics of modern life. This dynamic understanding of culture is a relatively recent approach within the scope of sociology and anthropology. Together with students from Ecuador, Iran and Jordan joining Turkish, Belgian and Dutch students, we looked at a participative, transcultural and interactive action within the fields of industrial design and social embedded, visual communication. The students designed interactive tools to look at cultural differentiation, to reflect on cultural issues and, as a result, to create a bridge between cultures. In this paper, we describe three projects as cases of best practice of the process of reflection and action upon culturally embedded aesthetic and ethical values and their relevance on the language of dynamic form and gesture