Listening to the Sociomaterial: Luis Vega, Maarit Mäkelä, & Pirita Seitamaa-Hakkarainen — Design Studies

Vega, Luis; Mäkelä, Maarit; & Seitamaa-Hakkarainen, Pirita (2023). Listening to the sociomaterial: When thinking through making extends beyond the individual. Design Studies, 88, 101203.

Current discussions in practice-led design research concentrate on the thoughtful dimension of working with materials and the problem of analyzing acts of making at the scale of individual practice. Informed by the theoretical tenets of sociomateriality, this paper encloses a practice-led study addressing both issues. We followed the making of a collaboration-based, material-intensive workshop designed by the first author, where he also participated as a maker. This approach afforded us an insider’s perspective to delineate how thinking through making transcends the individual and distributes across the entangled becoming of the social and the material. Our findings shed light on four features of sociomaterial assemblages that warrant critical attention in practice-led design research: (1) temporality, (2) contingency, (3) epistemic capability, and (4) analytical agency.