The Vanishing Mundane: An Experimental Archive of Everyday Rituals Lost to Digitalization

Author:
Livia Magalhaes da Silva Badiani
Supervisor:
Triin Jerlei
University:
EKA

Digitalization has eliminated everyday rituals without documenting them. Preservation frameworks focus on living traditions and digitized objects, not practices already lost. This practice-led service design thesis investigates this gap. Through interviews and workshops, the research found that people retain the memory of lost rituals and museums hold the objects they depended on, but nothing connects the two. The design outcome is The Vanishing Mundane, an open-access digital archive connecting entries to museum collections through shared object vocabulary, in a format useful to contributors and curators. The project argues that everyday rituals are structurally disappearing heritage from below (Muzaini & Minca, 2018), and that a design intervention bridging memory and museum infrastructure can preserve them.

Link to full thesis