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

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.