At this past weekend’s meeting of the Seattle Robotics Society, Kerry Hammil and Michael Ashby demonstrated the Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer “open-source toolkit for building small electronic devices using the .NET Micro Framework and Visual Studio/Visual C# Express.” Very cool stuff. The projects they showed included two robots; an infrared controller for a remote-control helicopter; a self-contained, stop-motion animation record-and-playback system; and miniature arcade game.
Check out some of the sensors, actuators, and other component modules for Gadgeteer, designed, developed, and/or distributed by GHI and Seeed Studio. You can also create your own modules.
These modular, reusable, rapid-development toolkits such as Gadgeteer, GROVE, and Phidgets would be great for creating ad hoc electronic ritual tools and interactions that you can break down and later turn into new tools or interactions.