The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the development of alternative formats for religious rituals, such as Protestant online worship services. However, current design approaches focus on problem-solving, and the resulting online solutions merely imitate the offline status quo. To overcome these limitations, we suggest adopting a provotype approach that allows for a more holistic, open-ended dialogue with those affected. We iteratively developed a first provotype in response to tensions found in observation-based field research, aiming to test whether and how it can trigger productive impulses for exploring future technology-mediated worship services based on existing experiences and perspectives. The resulting God-I-Box exaggerates individuality and allows congregants to act almost like liturgists. An analysis of congregants’ and pastors’ (online) first encounters with the God-I-Box revealed three reaction modes: spontaneous emotions, reflective coping, and exploratory imagination. We conclude with reflections and recommendations for provocative research and design in this context and beyond.

This paper presents an inspirational concept for companion technology design, uncontrollability, and a corresponding artefact, the Blessing Companion. Both originated from a research through design project exploring companion technologies for blessing rituals. We established an exchange with Protestant theologians, explored believers’ experiences of blessings, co-speculated on potential technologies, and refined the resulting ideas through ideation, prototyping, and testing. Inspired by believers’ descriptions of blessing experiences as not plannable, predictable, controllable, or enforceable, we adopted the concept of uncontrollability, explored how it might be implemented in companion technologies, and designed the Blessing Companion. The Blessing Companion embodies uncontrollability through its ambiguous appearance and (partly) uncontrollable behaviour. It thus stands in contrast to the prevailing on-demand and user-driven interaction paradigms. We discuss how uncontrollability can be reflected in content, form, and interaction, highlight respective possibilities for companion technologies, and reflect on the Blessing Companion as an example of designing for religious rituals.

Abstract Workarounds, or practices that deviate from the official pathway to a target, are frequent phenomena in the organisational context. With respect to collaboration, they highlight an area of mismatch between normative versus lived work practices, and therefore depict a relevant research area deeply rooted in computer supported cooperative work (CSCW). Building on the theory of hierarchical opposition by Louis Dumont and empirical data collected through ethnographic research at a company classified as a small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) in the German metal industry, this paper addresses the emergence of workarounds in collaborative work processes by setting them into the wider organisational context. The organisational layer of analysis reveals that workarounds emerge to cater for inversed information power relations and information asymmetries in the shop floor setting, which require communication to flow against the hierarchical slope between planning and execution functions. By applying an organisational lens to the concept of workarounds, this paper contributes a novel empirical analysis that confirms the value of workarounds as a source of insight into collaborative practices.

Abstract Life transitions, such as the transition from childhood to adulthood, are often accompanied by meaning-making actions such as rituals. Rituals increasingly involve the use of interactive technology. While previous research has focused on specific contexts or technologies, a bird’s eye view of the many appropriation styles during life transitions is missing. To identify the range of technology’s appropriations, we analysed stories from 84 participants and compared these across different life transitions and technologies. We identified three roles interactive technology can play during life transitions: the role of (i) a facilitator easing the accomplishment of tasks within life transitions, (ii) an enabler creating opportunities for new transition rituals and (iii) a social actor that itself is the trigger or the content of transition rituals. We propose the three roles as a classification scheme to structure existing and future research and reflect on the design challenges and evaluation approaches.