Thinking with people and pots: A practice-led design study of sociomaterially distributed thought processes

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School of Arts, Design and Architecture | Doctoral thesis (article-based) | Defence date: 2024-11-15
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Authors

Date

2024

Department

Muotoilun laitos
Department of Design

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Mcode

Degree programme

Language

en

Pages

76 + 110

Series

Aalto University Publication Series DOCTORAL THESES, 211/2024

Abstract

One of the main interests of practice-led design research is to advance scholarly thinking through creative acts of making. While this form of research offers a unique epistemic sensibility facilitated by direct engagement with materials, knowledge production in the field tends to concentrate on the creative practices of individual designer-researchers. Collaborative and distributed design situations bring the potential to expand this epistemic sensibility beyond the individual, particularly by reconfiguring the social and material boundaries of one’s creative practice. The present thesis addresses this potential in an introductory summary and four peer-reviewed publications. Informed by theories of distributed cognition and sociomateriality, the summary and the publications comprise a practice-led design study illustrating how to account for the epistemic role of thinking with materials beyond the scale of individual acts of making. Publication 1 introduces the term distributed thinking through making to outline the thesis topic and the framework to investigate it. Premised on decentering the figure of the designer-researcher, the framework recalibrates the onto-epistemological dimension of ‘practice’ in practice-led design research. This refers to maintaining the site of knowledge production within one’s creative practice while expanding the nature of such practice beyond individual modes of practicing. Publication 2 presents a method to analyze shared acts of making as sociomaterial entanglements, drawing insights from a pottery-based design practice I followed as a non-participant observer. Publications 3 and 4 incorporate the framework and the method through practice-led research examples in which I engaged in the collective prototyping of two additional pottery-based design practices. The prototypes consisted of designing a co-located workshop and a remote collaboration project, each affording a distinct empirical setting to elicit processes of distributed thinking via more-than-individual acts of making. In both examples, the object of thinking was the prototype, whereas the things we made to enact that thinking were not just pots but shared modes of practicing. My original contribution to knowledge is thus a methodological approach to conducting practice-led design research. In addition to presenting a new method of data analysis, the contribution extends established data generation methods from subjective elicitation and reflection to intersubjective sensemaking and diffraction, and it proposes a theory-methods integration to navigate the entanglement of research and practice intersubjectively. In this vein, the findings delineate the entangled becoming of thinking and making, individuality and collectivity, and sociality and materiality in collaborative and distributed design situations, elucidating how to draw meaningful boundaries when studying such forms of entanglement from within. The thesis targets design scholars, designer-researchers, and doctoral students interested in tinkering with the philosophical foundations of design research led by practice. Yet, it holds relevance for a wider community of researchers grappling with the challenge of being constitutive and co-productive of their objects of inquiry.

Description

Supervising professor

Mäkelä, Maarit, Prof., Aalto University, Department of Design, Finland

Thesis advisor

Mäkelä, Maarit, Prof., Aalto University, Department of Design, Finland
Seitamaa-Hakkarainen, Pirita, Prof., University of Helsinki, Finland

Keywords

design processes, distributed cognition, practice-led research, sociomateriality, thinking through making

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Parts

  • [Publication 1]: Vega, Luis (2021). Distributed thinking through making: Towards a relational ontology in practice-led design research. In Eva Brandt, Thomas Markussen, Eeva Berglund, Guy Julier, & Per Linde (Eds.), Matters of Scale: Proceedings of the 9th Nordic Design Research Conference NORDES 2021, 270–80.
    Full text in Acris/Aaltodoc: https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-202108258447
    DOI: 10.21606/nordes.2021.29 View at publisher
  • [Publication 2]: Vega, Luis; Mäkelä, Maarit; Chen, Tzuyu; & Seitamaa-Hakkarainen, Pirita (2021). Moments of entanglement: Following the sociomaterial trajectories of an intersubjective studio practice. Form Akademisk: Research Journal of Design and Design Education, 14(2), 1–14.
    Full text in Acris/Aaltodoc: https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-202105267025
    DOI: 10.7577/formakademisk.4191 View at publisher
  • [Publication 3]: Vega, Luis; Mäkelä, Maarit; & Seitamaa-Hakkarainen, Pirita (2023). Listening to the sociomaterial: When thinking through making extends beyond the individual. Design Studies, 88(1), Article 101203.
    Full text in Acris/Aaltodoc: https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-202306304331
    DOI: 10.1016/j.destud.2023.101203 View at publisher
  • [Publication 4]: Vega, Luis (Forthcoming). Thinking through making together-apart: The sociomaterial becoming of a geographically distributed design practice. Publication process ongoing.

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https://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-64-2061-5

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[diss] Taiteiden ja suunnittelun korkeakoulu / ARTS