Designing tradition: participatory design and cultural resilience in the creation of a Balinese Ogoh-Ogoh

This ethnographic study analyses the co-design of Mamah Warak, a Balinese ritual effigy (Ogoh-Ogoh) collaboratively produced by a youth collective and a ritual specialist (Undagi) for the 2025 Kesanga Festival. The project reanimated a 19th-century gaguritan narrative through a hybrid workflow combining digital modelling with traditional, fully biodegradable materials, while the entire design cycle was governed by sacred temporalities embedded in the Nyepi ritual calendar. Operating within a pluriversal cosmological framework, the study challenges secular and liberal Participatory Design (PD) models that presuppose human consensus, iterative flexibility, and material endurance as universal design values. Drawing on decolonial design theory and design anthropology, the analysis advances two conceptual contributions. Cosmologically Attuned Participation (CAP) reframes co-design as an ethical alignment with layered authorship rooted in ancestral narrative authority and ritual decree. Ephemeral Cosmotechnics (EC) articulates a design logic in which impermanence is the ontological condition of fulfilment, positioning the effigy’s ritual destruction (mralina) as the culmination of its design purpose rather than its negation. The findings demonstrate that the re-enactment of ancestral narratives operates as a mode of speculative heritage that strengthens cultural resilience, underscoring the need for PD methodologies capable of engaging sacred, non-replicable, and more-than-human design ontologies.