The New Beauty Council (NBC) project, in its different forms and shapes, is about the multiple perceptions of urban space and design. NBC’s work includes performances, public projects, speaker series, urban curating and collaborations that engage innovative strategies of production as well as dialogues. NBC investigates how concepts of the public are constituted and how beauty and ugliness can be (re-)defined. Using the idea of the carnivalesque as a method, NBC engages with organizations and institutions, which shape and interpret cities through public conversations and staged situations. The founding members are Annika Enqvist, Anna Kharkina, Thérèse Kristiansson and Kristoffer Svenberg.

A recent project is Changed Perspectives c/o Stockholm City Museum – comprising four public talks about living in and making use of Stockholm as a city. These conversations were curated and performed by Annika Enqvist and Thérèse Kristiansson.1 The research and subjects of the series in general, and one of the talks; Whatever Blows Our Trumpet in particular, are the basis of this paper. Lounging the NBC as a collaborative initiative, building the website, producing the public talks and curating other works have been a part of the practical part of my MA project.

The thesis project Engaged Encounters has been a multi-part investigation into art criticism. Its main components are one of practice and one of theory: a fiction text – Transatlantic Journeys – which I am publishing as a small book in an edition of 200 and exhibiting at Konstfack´s Spring Show, and the present reflective essay.

In the essay, I identify the central elements of the current «crisis of art criticism» and ask what impact experimental writing modes can have on the practice and its alleged crisis. I give an account of fields of contemporary writing where the text is acting with or through, rather than being about, art. I find that a common view is that the crisis, real as it might be, can serve as a possibility to re-envision art writing.

The fiction text, a two-part short story, is a critical response to my one month internship at Henie Onstad Art Centre. A character is extracted from a chosen artwork of the then current exhibition and "cast" in the narrative opposite the history of the art institution.

In the fiction as well as in the essay, I treat the «engaged encounter», the face to face meeting with the other. This is the aspect of art criticism I at present find to be most pertinent: criticism as an encounter between work and viewer, a reciprocal addressing analogous to the risky business of face-to-face human relations. The Norwegian word henvendelsen (approximately approach, address) is the key term used to denote this relation. The insights of the linguist Benveniste and the philosopher Levinas are important references.

The remarks on this subject stem from the conditions spatial works engender in the encounter with the viewer. The aim has been to provide the reader with a framework within which to place individual experiences of the works.

The exhibition Spatial Works, to which this research paper is connected, exemplifies variations within spatial work. By organizing an exhibition around this context, the variations presented is fleshed out. The research preceding the exhibition has resulted in the development of a specific terminology; an articulation of different practices in installation art. Psychodramatic, Thespian, Temporal and Permutation are here seen as mannerisms of spatial works of art.

The expanded significance presented in this paper is a feature of composition, as the dramatic condition characterizes the encounter between object and subject. The polyphony of information encountered by the viewer is not only created by the art work itself, but also by its signifying composition, so to say `al fresco´ of the work, of which the observer gains certainty of the pieces spatiality as well as understands of the work of art.

The emerging field of experience design positions the aspect of time in the center of its interest.

Thomas Scheff in his book “Catharsis in Healing, Ritual and Drama” argues that modern western societies are being characterized by the process of ‘deritualization’.

The notion of ritual, which essence underlies in symbolic (inter)action in specifically arranged time-space conditions, looses its relevance in contemporary secular societies . This disappearing value, in the past used to be constituted by rituals’ positive impact on maintaining and consolidating social relationships and efficiency in dealing with emotional fluctuations. The routinized behaviors extinguish the sacredness , suspension or transition of time, formerly upheld by symbolic enactments.

The poverty of symbolic methods for getting along with sometimes polarized affections and in many cases developed as codes for communicating them, causes an emotional repression and blockage of distress. Thus, this research focuses particularly on these rites which have an aim in restoring the emotional balance. Depending on culture and system of belief they have been described as purifying, transforming or restoring.

The ritual sense is being communicated through symbolic behaviours. These usually involve specifically designed and developed items, settings and gestures. The ritual’s dualism is constituted by in one hand a transcendental (symbolic) dimension and on the other material, social, psychological and behavioural sphere. The later one seems to be accessible for the design methodology. In this thesis I will speculate whether rituals can exist without being anchored in certain belief, so in secular dimension only.

The question I address in my theoretical and practical studies is whether experience design can derive advantages from ritual studies in order to reclaim the positive role of rites in secular context. Thus, the immersive research into methods and constructions of transformative and restoring rituals across cultures, communities and religions, with its particular focus on time structure, let me understand better how the time-space arrangement and choreography it always establishes, can be possibly seen from, studied by and adapted into the the design realm.

The conclusions from theoretical research have their extensions in practice. The practical implementation of knowledge developed throughout theoretical research period and the practice-based interventions, aims in establishing conditions for time-based experience of self-reflection and self-expression (introspection and extrospection). The final project while abandoning the divine layer, focuses on secular aspects of transformative ritual. Its form and arrangement results from analysis and studies of common aspects and methods existing across various traditions.

The designed installation in its practical dimension combines elements of architecture, performance and interaction (sound) design. The setting is intended to function in a public space.

This thesis aims to introduce new methods within the field of experience design, an emergent interdisciplinary design discipline, using these methods as tools for debate and for the communication of new design concepts. An important part of the methods come from trendspotting practice and future studies methodology. The backbone of the final project is a “meta-method” which incorporates common methods surveyed so far: the “for/from” method. The first part of the “for/from” method is about designing prototypes and creating fictional narratives to project current trends into the future, the second part is perhaps less structured, but more ambitious, carrying fictional futures to the daily lives, to test and evaluate the scenarios created. Staging experiments and experiences around these proposed methodologies and testing the concepts through workshops forms the core of the proposed design practice. Since the domain of futures thinking is not populated by designers, it is of special importance to me as how designers might find a place in such interdisciplinary teams and how the organizational levels of these so-called complex experiential structures could allow designers to participate. I argue that experience designers not only design customer experiences to please and aestheticize products but they have the power to change people’s (rather than customers’) opinions, using the same tools the field of marketing and exhibition design offers them.