Future Rituals

The preventative measures for COVID-19 have not only affected our everyday lives in a multitude of ways but also influenced the development of didactics by introducing previously untested teaching methods and means of collaboration. Within this context the project “Future Rituals” was born, developed by students during the Communication Design Laboratory at the Iuav University of Venice, Italy. The choice and challenge was to address the topic of the pandemic through the practice of speculative design, central theme of the first semester’s laboratory. In this design fiction project, students were asked to answer a disturbing but plausible question: What would happen to our daily habits if the pandemic continued for the next 5 years? The response was a documentary collection of gestures that have accompanied the entire emergency phase and a reflection on their possible future evolutions. By answering countless questions that characterise our present — How to return to confront the outside world without leaving one’s own home? How to experience concerts, travels, interactions with other individuals again? — a sort of map was developed capable of connecting those signals of the present whose decoding helps us to interpret future developments.