Designing with Everyday Life Rhythms: An Auto-Ethnographic Experiment

This work builds on the conceptualisation of everyday life as the basic context for social transitions, where collective imagination is formed through performance and re-enactments of routines and relations. Routines reproduce norms by repeating certain actions over time. For this reason everyday life can be considered a primary terrain for social changes, as affecting everyday norms means disrupting a larger structured reality. Therefore, for radical imaginaries to gain momentum, we ought to better understand how to break down and disrupt routines. This paper contributes to the field of transition design with an experiential technique that, by interjecting into daily rhythms, aims at cultivating reflexivity, problematising the present and opening for alternatives. Recognising rhythms as the “visible moving parts” behind the larger machine at play in our society, I combine rhythm-analysis and transformative practices, with a futuring approach. I conducted an auto-ethnographic experiment where I intervened on and slowed down my daily rhythms to explore those naturalized routines to investigate the normative system driving my mundane daily actions. Slowing down mundane activities translated into redesigning material arrangements and social practices, which in turns affects, questions and transforms the underlying values and mindsets inscribed within daily routines. This work shows that disrupting rhythms fosters different ways of repeating, helping reshape people’s images of the future.