The results of “Moving Rituals”, a joint project among METU Department of Industrial Design Masters Programme, TUe Department of Industrial Design Masters Programme, and LUCA/Sint Lukas Social Design Masters Proramme,  will be exhibited at METU Faculty of Architecture, between April 10th-13th, 2013. The opening coktail of the exhibition will be held on April 10th, Wednesday, at 16:00.

The workshop is being conducted at the Department of Industrial Design between April 1 and April 14, 2013 with the participation of 14 students and 3 instructors from METU, 7 students and 3 instructors from TU/e, and 3 students and 1 instructor from LUCA/Sint Lukas Brussels. As a result of the workshop, 5 different projects produced by 5 groups of students will be exhibited at the Faculty of Architecure, METU.

Within the scope of EU Erasmus Intensive Programmes, the aim of this project is to re-interpret cultural rituals together with the cultural dimensions of different communities within the context of the design field. In this project, the notion of culture is understood as continuously moving and changing, and reproducing itself dynamically with the contestations via the encounter between differences and similarites. So, the focus is on the rituals that play a significant part in everyday life, and formed and re-formed with the norms of modern daily life. In other words, the traditional structures that come to mind with 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 workshop, the approach towards rituals is concentrated upon 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.

Within the framework of the existing dynamics of modern life, the possibilities of expressing and living identities and differences are getting more and more perplexed and multi-faceted each day. In addition, today, identity politics is at the agenda of both discussions and experiences at multiple levels. In this respect, apart from its focus, the significance of this project is also visible due the very multicultural and different educational backgrounds of the workshop team. The workshop is not only being conducted by the participants from the Netherlands, Belgium and Turkey but from Jordan, Iraq, Iran and Equador. Thus, both with its multicultural structure and focus, this project is about re-interpreting the cultural differences and similarities over rituals through a cross- and multi-cultural perspective.

 

ID 501 Advanced Project Development course team

Figen Işık (METU), Burcu Derer Omay (METU), Yekta Bakırlıoğlu (METU)

Erasmus IP Partners

Johanna Kint (TU/e), Oscar Tomico (TU/e), Chet Bangaru (TU/e), Inge Frewerda (LUCA/Sint Lukas Brussels)