You’re probably a lot more familiar with the subtle details of your home now than you have been in a long time. From the crack in the living room floor to those same three spices in all of your dad's cooking to the time of the evening when, like clockwork,  your mom turns on the news.

The mundane can either provide comfort or drive you up the wall. It is also a perfect canvas for innovation.

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.  

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.
3. Re-imagine the experience, ritual, and object. Some prompts for that brainstorming are:
   • How would you improve or “fix” it?
   • Can you make it more playful or fun?
   • Do you want to diminish or highlight this experience/ritual/object?
   • 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?

Write down a couple of ideas for each.

4. For your favorite idea, 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 Remote 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.

Optional Next Steps:

Choose your favorite sketched idea, and make a quick sketch prototype.