Moments of Entanglement: Following the sociomaterial trajectories of an intersubjective studio practice

Abstract

This paper investigates the sociomateriality of collective creation in the context of a design studio project. Grounded in a relational approach that has influenced a multitude of studies in various fields, the notion of sociomateriality accounts for the constitutive entanglement of the social and the material in practice. How this entanglement occurs or what exactly is subjected to it, however, remains largely unarticulated, especially in studies where the handling of materials lies at the heart of the research process. By adopting a relational approach operationalized through qualitative network analysis, we traced the sociomaterial trajectories of a studio project to identify the moments in which various actors were entangled. The resulting network visualizes these moments and assists in explicating how they enabled the instantiation of intersubjective design ideas.