Listening to the sociomaterial: When thinking through making extends beyond the individual

Abstract

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: temporality, contingency, epistemic capability, and analytical agency.

Full text

Listening to the sociomaterial: When thinking
through making extends beyond the individual
Luis Vega, Department of Design, Aalto University School of Arts, Design
and Architecture, Espoo, Finland
Maarit M€
akel€
a, Department of Design, Aalto University School of Arts,
Design and Architecture, Espoo, Finland
Pirita Seitamaa-Hakkarainen, Department of Education, University of
Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
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: temporality, contingency, epistemic capability, and analytical agency.
Ó2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article
under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Keywords: collaborative design, design practice, design processes, research
methods, sociomateriality
This paper illustrates what happens in practice-led design research
when the practice that leads the research extends beyond an individ-
ual designer working with a predetermined material. Our focus is on
the first author’s process of designing a workshop, in which collaborative
making was both the subject matter and the medium of design. The workshop
involved the participation of four professional designers, including the author
himself, operating in a co-located setting deliberately prepared to elicit the
negotiation of meaning through the handling of multiple materials. We
analyze how the making of the workshop informed its design, delineating
how the sociomateriality of the setting (i.e., the entangled becoming of indi-
viduals, artifacts, tools, representations, desires, and so on) shaped the de-
signers’ shared practice and led the first author’s research process.
Corresponding author:
Luis Vega.
luis.vega@aalto.fi
www.elsevier.com/locate/destud
0142-694X Design Studies 88 (2023) 101203
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2023.101203
Ó2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
1

The general premise of the paper draws on the metaphor of ‘listening’ to the
material (Ingold, 2013, p. 31), which denotes thinking through its design po-
tential via iterative acts of making. By extending this form of thinking through
making to social practice, the paper explores what it is like to listen to the so-
ciomaterial. To that end, we employ a practice-led research approach read
through the lens of sociomaterialitydan ontology emphasizing the insepara-
bility of social doings from material things and vice-versa (Barad, 2007).
This approach allows us to examine socially organized design activity through
iterative work with its materials, but it also attunes us to the view that “there is
no social that is not also material and no material that is not also social”
(Orlikowski, 2007, p. 1437). As a result, the locus of thinking transcends the
individual and distributes across the entanglement of the social and the mate-
rial (cf. Hutchins, 1995). The main contribution of this paper is then to delin-
eate, from within design practice, how thinking unfolds through sociomaterially
distributed acts of making.
1The matter of thinking through making
We conceive of materials not as predefined substances ready to be manipulated
but as the evolving set of factors that configure the conditions of a design sit-
uation (Sch€
on, 1983). This means that materials are not limited to the physical
resources of the design environment but also encompass the sociocultural de-
terminants of the context of designing (see Orlikowski, 2007). Examples may
include pen and paper, people, clay, ideas, cultural symbols, or data. Further
detailed in Section 3, the situation analyzed herein incorporates all such exam-
ples. As for now, the point is that what characterizes these seemingly disparate
elements as materials is their potential as a medium of creation: they all can be
employed to create something new. We maintain that regardless of the purpose
they serve or the type of engagement they afford, materials are integral to
designing insofar as they inform the creative processes of designers.
One such creative process concerns the act of making. Here, making signifies
working directly with materials to bring things into existence, be they con-
cepts, objects, or situationsdprovided these are experienceable and communi-
cable. Through making, designers can concretely generate ideas and iteratively
refine their approach based on the feedback received from materials. The rela-
tionship between designing and making is intricate and dynamic. Anthropol-
ogist Tim Ingold (2013) remarks that both designing and making entail
processes of materialization that cannot be reduced to a simple divide between
conceptual representation and practical execution (p. 73). In the same vein,
our perspective is that making is neither separate from designing nor consti-
tutes a ‘stage’ of it (G€
ursoy &
€
Ozkar, 2015;Knight & Vardouli, 2015). We
see both as mutually supportive yet inherently distinct processes.
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2

Arguably the main distinction between the two is that designing deploys a
more deliberate manner of thinking, which ranges from providing direction-
ality and reducing complexity (Bjørn & Østerlund, 2014;Sch€
on, 1983) to es-
tablishing connections and seeking cohesion (G€
ursoy &
€
Ozkar, 2015;
Ingold, 2013). Philosopher Donald Sch€
on (1983) notes that designing involves
framing the context and setting the boundaries of an ill-defined situation to
determine the directions in which it can be addressed (p. 40). Information sys-
tems researchers Pernille Bjørn and Castern Østerlund (2014) also explain how
setting boundaries allows designers to address complex situations, indicating
that breaking down intricate problem spaces into manageable components is
central to designing (pp. 27e29). Design scholars Benay G€
ursoy and Mine
€
Ozkar (2015) state that the creativity inherent in this process lies in the contin-
uous exploration of new and existing relationships between such components
(p. 32), following Ingold’s (2013) idea that designing entails a way of envision-
ing how multiple parts can be assembled to generate a coherent whole (p. 61).
Far from casting design as a mental activity committed to achieving certainty
before materialization, we draw the distinction between designing and making
to indicate that the thinking involved in designing can be profoundly enriched
by more attentive engagement with materials. We thereby concentrate on the
kind of design practice wherein designers partake as makers of the things they
design, foregrounding the adaptability afforded by making and its openness to
uncertainty and experimentation. This paper specifically recounts how the first
author designed a workshop by simultaneously participating in its making. In
short, it contextualizes designing as a way of “thinking through making” (see
Dixon, 2020, p. 79; El-Zanfaly, 2015, pp. 81e3; Ingold, 2013, p. 6), in which
thinking and making constitute simultaneous processes of the same practical
activity.
The recent turn to materiality has given prominence to the thoughtful dimen-
sion of making in design research.
1
In particular, practice-led design research
has positioned itself as a scholarly mode of thinking through making by legit-
imizing making-intensive design practice as a means of academic inquiry.
2
Designer-researchers within this tradition have contributed cutting-edge
studies articulating their experiential knowledge as makers in various design
contexts.
3
Essential to these articulations is the active role of materiality in
shaping subjective perceptions and judgments (see Bennet, 2010, pp. 1e19),
an aspect portrayed as the potential of materials to spark a designer’s “expres-
sive capacity” (Nimkulrat, 2021, p. 35), “evoke meaning-making associations”
(Hekkert & Karana, 2014, p. 8), provoke “sensations and emotions” (Petreca
et al., 2019, p. 9), trigger “mental images” (Groth, 2017, p. 68), “catalyze
ideas” (Grigg, 2020, p. 3), “guide design decisions” (Tsaknaki & Fernaeus,
2017, p. 315), convey what “cannot be described by words” (Nyk€
anen,
Wingstedt, Sundhage, & Mohlin, 2015, p. 33), or uncover “emergent features”
in a desired outcome (Kamath, 2020, p. 26).
Listening to the sociomaterial
3

Albeit referring to distinct types of material engagement serving different pur-
poses, the expressions cited above share one important characteristic: they are
used not to describe what materials are but to indicate what materials can do
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 409; Ingold, 2013, p. 31). Such an approach to
working with materials typifies the designerly ability to think generatively.
Emblematic of the pragmatist, process-oriented attitude prevalent in
practice-led design research, this mode of thinking advances an ontology of
becoming based on the idea that designing always underlies an act of transfor-
mation (Dixon, 2020, p. 170). Our turn to sociomateriality takes the same de-
signerly approach. Instead of concentrating on the factual structure of
sociomaterial assemblages (i.e., the social and material actors entangled in
the workshop), we explore what these assemblages are capable of producing.
Listening to the sociomaterial thus amounts to conducting research flexibly
rather than rigidly, a way of working that, as many have argued (e.g.,
Krogh & Koskinen, 2020;Redstr€
om, 2017;Stappers & Giaccardi, 2017),
best captures how designer-researchers produce scholarly knowledge.
2Entangled matter: from materiality to sociomateriality
Turning to sociomateriality comes with three direct implications for practice-
led design research. As expressed above, the first implication involves moving
the focus from what materials can do to what materials and designers (in
plural) can produce together. The second implication lies in prioritizing rela-
tions over actors (Gherardi, 2017, p. 39), whether they be social or material.
This new priority posits designing as a matter of relationships, whereby the
ontology of becoming mentioned earlier transforms into an ontology of
becoming-with (see Akama, 2015;Haraway, 2008;Puig de la Bellacasa,
2012). Hence, the third implication concerns placing the unit of analysis at
the level of relational activity (Gherardi, 2017, p. 43), meaning that instead
of analyzing social and material actors as discrete entities with predetermined
qualities, we attend to them as emerging relations performed in practice
(Orlikowski, 2007, p. 1438). In other words, we take their entangled becoming
throughout the workshop as the unit that makes this attentiveness possible.
Considering these implications offers an appropriate lens to understand how
the social is material and the material social. Read through this lens, actors
such as designers, artifacts, shared meanings, or workshop suppliesdwhich
otherwise would count as either social or materialdcan neither exist a priori
nor be examined without what they do with one another (Jones, 2013,p.
221). This does not mean that material phenomena cannot occur indepen-
dently of social practice, but it does show that social practice has no epistemic
value “without the specific materiality that produces it” (Scott & Orlikowski,
2014, p. 875). Likewise, this indicates that materiality is only apprehensible
through socially constructed devices designated to investigate it (Knorr-
Cetina, 1999;Latour, 1987). Philosopher Karen Barad (2007) refers to these
Design Studies Vol 88 No. C Month 2023
4

devices as apparatuses, insisting that they are not epistemically neutral but
imbued with situated knowledge (see also Haraway, 1988, p. 581). Whether
research instruments, methodological conventions, or workshops in the mak-
ing, apparatuses are constitutive and co-productive of what is being researched
(Barad, 2007, p. 232). They do not merely serve to apprehend the phenomenon
under investigation; they become constitutively entangled with it.
The constitutive entanglement of the social and the material thereby signals
the inseparability of epistemology from ontology. As sociomateriality scholar
Lotta Hultin (2019) asserts, “knowledge [production] is a process that cannot
be separated from the practices performed to enact it” (p. 93, emphasis added).
The same assertion applies to situations of thinking through making in
practice-led design research. They involve modes of knowledge production
that entangle the knower with the known, meaning that the researcher is not
just investigating a design practice but also enacting it by being the design prac-
titioner. Situations like this may lead to confounding practice and research,
causing ambiguous formulations that compromise “the [rigor] associated
with studies of other people’s designing” (Pedgley, 2007, p. 464).
Such ambiguity requires designer-researchers to draw boundaries and make
distinctions, a procedure that Barad (2007) refers to as performing agential
cuts (p. 178). In addition to separating the researcher from the practice being
researched, agential cuts enable the slicing-and-dicing of sociomaterial assem-
blages into discrete actors and moments of action (see Knight, 2018, p. 209;
Suchman, 2007, p. 283). This slicing-and-dicing provides research intelligi-
bility by “creating order in the entanglement” (Bjørn & Østerlund, 2014,p.
27), though it depends on the apparatuses employed to perform it and the sit-
uated knowledge embedded therein. Agential cuts are hence necessary but rely
on implicit assumptions. Paying closer attention to how apparatuses are
configured can render these assumptions explicit. For practice-led design
research, this means mobilizing knowledge production beyond individual
perception by considering how the social shaping of apparatuses allows phe-
nomena to be perceived.
By including other designers in the making of the practices whereby research
phenomena are made intelligible (whether these practices involve designing
workshops or other types of apparatuses), designer-researchers may be better
equipped to articulate their experiential knowledge without being limited to
pre-individuated perspectives. Adopting a sociomaterial lens is thus a highly
relevant task for practice-led design research. The lens adopted herein, as we
have articulated elsewhere (Vega, 2021), “maintains the locus of knowledge
production within design practice but expands the nature of such practice
beyond individual modes of practicing” (p. 271). The core of our contribution
lies in providing an empirical example of how this can be done and what it can
illuminate.
Listening to the sociomaterial
5

2.1 Sociomaterially distributed thinking through making
Numerous frameworks have informed empirical studies of more-than-
individual design activity, yet evidence of their application in practice-led
design research remains scarce. To better position this study, we extend prior
work on collaborative designing that acknowledges the significance of material
actors in the formation and socialization of thought processes. Design scholar
Graham Dove and colleagues (2018), for example, analyze the role of sticky
notes as representational objects, discussing how their materiality is an essen-
tial resource with which design teams think. Interaction design researcher Jo-
hann Blomkvist and service designer Fabian Segelstr€
om (2014) explore how
the making of service prototypes allows designers to collaboratively materi-
alize their thoughts and externalize abstract ideas. Learning scientists Pippa
Yeoman and Lucila Carvalho (2019) also outline processes of materialization,
noting how these underpin the creation of shared mental models and facilitate
building consensus.
While these studies vary in scope and approach, they all incorporate distrib-
uted cognition theory to describe how thought processes among designers
are socially transmitted and materially mediated (see Hollan, Hutchins, &
Kirsh, 2000;Hutchins, 1995). Distributed cognition has become a relevant
framework in design research due to its emphasis on situated practice and
the role of materials as representational media (Ball & Christensen, 2018;Le
Dantec, 2010). It holds that thinking emerges at the interface of people, things,
and contexts, challenging cognitivist views that confine the occurrence of
thought processes to individual mental activity. Design research focusing on
material engagement often combines it with different approaches from similar
frameworks. One such framework, namely the 4E Research Program, offers
embedded, embodied, enactive, and extended views of cognition (Rowlands,
2010), highlighting how material actors such as the environment, the body,
and the tools used to accomplish tasks are also integral to thinking.
Of interest here is the enactive approach. It proposes that thinking is entangled
with real-world material engagement rather than based on mental representa-
tions of a pre-given material world. As cognitive archaeologist Lambros
Malafouris (2013) puts it, material things “do not represent; they enact.
They do not stand for reality; they bring forth reality” (p. 118). Enactivism
is consistent with sociomateriality since both contend that phenomena are
never pre-given but always in the making. Distributed cognition, however, is
rooted in a socio-technical perspective that differs from the sociomaterial
lens adopted herein. Though not incompatible, their difference lies in the onto-
logical status they grant to materiality.
4
The former treats materials as external
to mental activity, whereas the latter deems them performative of it (Carlile,
Nicolini, Langley, & Tsoukas, 2013, p. 2). Understood from enactive and so-
ciomaterial perspectives, working with materials is not simply a means to
Design Studies Vol 88 No. C Month 2023
6

externalize preexisting ideas; it is a way of performing ideation in itselfdit is
thinking through making.
To reclaim this performative aspect, we revisit the notion of distributed cogni-
tion with the term distributed thinking through making (for a detailed theoret-
ical discussion, see Vega, 2021). This term draws on Hutchins’s framework to
accentuate social practice while questioning its treatment of materiality as a
mere representational medium. Further, it helps us demarcate our research
from studies of design cognition. What we want to underscore here is that
instead of disregarding representations, we consider them inseparable from
performative actions. Representations and actions are entangled components
of the same epistemic becoming (Barad, 2007;Orlikowski, 2007), the nature of
which cannot be scrutinized with representational methods alone. In sum,
distributed thinking through making denotes our phenomenon of interest but
also articulates a methodological framework to study it: we are interested in
how thinking is distributed and enacted rather than individuated and pre-
existing, and we investigate it by performing it through acts of making.
3Handling the matter together: materials and methods
We followed the process of designing Transcultural Pottery, a collaboration-
based, material-intensive workshop intended to contest individualized modes
of thinking through making. Moving away from a substantialist perspective
wherein cultures constitute systemic entities clearly differentiated from one
another, the notion of transculturality provided a conceptual framing to high-
light the relational condition of cultures as fluid, open-ended, and ever-
changing processes (Benessaieh, 2010; see also Ingold, 2014). In plain terms,
the workshop was envisioned as a space where boundaries were not predeter-
mined but continually being made, promoting the entanglement of multiple
ways of doing so that no individual contribution could be clear-cut. The
goal was thus to unsettle fixed ways of working by presenting the challenge
of negotiating a new, pluralized, and contingent culture of practice.
As mentioned earlier, we employed the workshop as a research apparatus to
illustrate how designer-researchers are both constitutive and co-productive
of what they research (see Hultin, 2019, p. 93). The first author designed the
workshop while bringing it into existence with three other professional de-
signers. Including other designers permitted the intersubjective making of
the practice (i.e., the way the workshop was designed) whereby our phenom-
enon of interest was rendered intelligible. Put simply, “the designing of the
[workshop] continue[d] into its making” (Ingold, 2013, p. 69), and such mak-
ing became sociomaterially distributed (Figure 1). To streamline the presenta-
tion of the research setting, the first author is hereafter identified as ‘the
researcher’ but still included when we refer to ‘the designers’ as a group.
Listening to the sociomaterial
7

By ‘collaboration-based,’ we mean that the workshop was not facilitated by
the researcher but driven by the interests of the designers. No activities were
defined in advance, and everyone was encouraged to make decisions and
take the lead to the best of their abilities. This way of working aimed to foster
a sense of inclusivity and strived for a balanced distribution of participation.
Yet, it is necessary to acknowledge that while the intention was to provide
equal chances for every participant, participation was distributed across
diverse modes of contribution based on factors such as language fluency,
type of practical expertise, and personal understanding of the multiple facets
of the design situation. Integrating such diverse modes of contribution into
the creation of something is what we call collaborative making.
To provide directionality and ensure a common objective, nonetheless, the
researcher prepared a task that consisted of making pots. The task was
expressly open-ended but still framed by three constraints: the pots had to
be made with red clay, by hand, and collaboratively. Whereas the open-
ended part sought to stimulate the designerly ability to think generatively,
the set of constraints intended to provide the basis for sociomaterial negotia-
tion (cf. Bucciarelli, 2002;Luck, 2007). The designers then had to make mul-
tiple things besides pots, including shared representations, communicable
concepts, timetables, rules for working together, and other material-
discursive devices needed to achieve that goal. In this fashion, pot-making
was only a means to elicit the collaborative making of the workshop.
All aspects described above helped specify the two initial features of the work-
shop design. The first feature focused on avoiding taking boundaries for
granted, enabling the researcher to operate across cultural divides prevalent
in pottery practices (i.e., master-apprentice), workshop dynamics (i.e.,
facilitator-participant), professional identity discourses (i.e., designer-
maker), and models of epistemic labor (i.e., researcher-practitioner), as well
as to perceive his various roles not as fixed or pre-given but rather as flexible
and emergent (see Bjørn & Østerlund, 2014, p. 36; Fischer,
€
Ostlund, & Peine,
2021, p. 6). The second feature concerned the competencies, attitudes, and
mindsets required to undertake the workshop task, which became the main
criteria for selecting the designers. The selection was based on diversity in
terms of skill, area of design expertise, gender, and geographical background
(Table 1). It is worth mentioning that the designers had previous experience of
working with clay and had not collaborated on a design project before.
The workshop was prepared during November 2020 and implemented in Es-
poo, Finland, in January 2021. It was held in English over 14 three-hour ses-
sions, the first of which was dedicated to presenting the task and explaining the
purposes of the research. Due to the restrictions imposed by the covid-19
pandemic, the intended venue had to be replaced by a multi-purpose studio
facilitated by the Department of Design at Aalto University. All designers
Design Studies Vol 88 No. C Month 2023
8

gave informed consent to participate in the study and asked to have their real
names published.
3.1 Data generation framework
Empirical data were generated throughout the design practice and captured in
notes, studio diaries, visual materials, video recordings, photographs, and
transcriptions. Table 2 divides the process of designing the workshop into
two overarching phases, each of which yielded a different dataset. Dataset I
includes material extracted from the workshop preparation phase, whereas
Dataset II contains evidence recorded during the workshop implementation
phase. Although records of more-than-individual design activity are only
extant in the latter, both datasets were integral to the analysis since they jointly
detail how the research apparatus was sociomaterially configured.
Figure 1 Research apparatus: the workshop was designed to generate itself through sociomaterially distributed acts of making
Table 1 Participant selection
Designer Name Core expertise Geographical background
A Erin Material exploration Middle East
B Amedeo Experimental design Southern Europe
C Tzuyu Hand-building East Asia
D Luis Collaborative design Latin America
Listening to the sociomaterial
9

The workshop preparation phase consisted of selecting some of the socioma-
terial components of the research setting, a procedure for which we used
different strategies. The selection of supplies relied on convenience rather
than design intent (see Patton, 2002, pp. 241e2). The department had allo-
cated 80 kg of local red clay for research purposes, and the studio was already
equipped with working tables and hand-building tools. The selection of partic-
ipants relied on a more systematic logic. An open call was published targeting
designers working in Helsinki and Espoo. It was open for a week and re-
sponded to by fourteen eligible applicants, six of whom were shortlisted and
separately interviewed. Two of them, Erin and Amedeo, were included for
participation, leaving space for the third designer, Tzuyu, who was purpo-
sively selected based on previous involvement in similar projects (see
Creswell & Plano Clark, 2017, p. 176). The fourth designer, Luis, is the
researcher, who recorded this phase’s activities via notes.
During the workshop implementation phase, we used various methods to cap-
ture the thoughtful dimension of collaborative making. One of them was
asking the designers to use studio diaries as self-documentation tools, a tech-
nique that has proven efficient in practice-led design research (Pedgley, 2007,
p. 471; M€
akel€
a & Nimkulrat, 2018, p. 13). The researcher supplied the de-
signers with individual diaries, allowing us to keep an intersubjective record
of the design practice (Figure 2). This procedure facilitated two additional
methods of data generation. On the one hand, it stimulated reflection (see
Sch€
on, 1983, pp. 61e2), not only by permitting the designers to revisit their
thoughts but also by exposing how their thinking was performed
(Sadokierski, 2020,p.6;Vega, 2021, p. 227). On the other hand, it served as
a tool for diffraction (see Barad, 2007, p. 88; Haraway, 2004, p. 70), baring pat-
terns of difference and accentuating the possibility of “opposing, contradict-
ing, and confronting” (Groten, 2022, p. 120). The combination of diaries
shown in Figure 2, for example, illustrates distinct aspects of the practice
captured in diverse documentation styles. Making this diversity visible encour-
aged the designers to second-guess habitual ways of thinking while supporting
the idea that all modes of contribution could be valid.
Table 2 Data generation framework
Dataset Phase of design
practice
Time frame Data generation methods Data capturing tools
I Workshop
preparation
November 2020 Documentation, call for
applications, interviews
Notes
II Workshop
implementation
January 2021 Documentation, reflection,
diffraction
Studio diaries, visual
materials, video
recordings, photographs,
transcriptions
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10

Apart from the diaries, the designers collected and produced visual materials
that included sketches, images, diagrams, and prototypes, all of which were in-
tegrated into the studio documentation. The workshop sessions were video re-
corded and transcribed. We installed one camera on a standing tripod and
another on the ceiling, obtaining different views of whole-studio dynamics
(see Le Dantec, 2010, p. 210). A third camera was used by the researcher to
take photographs of activities requiring closer documentation. Since the work-
shop task entangled the negotiation of meaning with the handling of materials,
verbal data were effortlessly elicited as a result of the designers’ attempt to
communicate in multiple modalities.
3.2 Data analysis procedure
To delineate how thinking unfolded through sociomaterially distributed acts
of making, we drew from network-based methods while reevaluating their
pertinence for a study like this. Networks adequately assist in visualizing
how relations between actors shape distributed phenomena (Decuypere,
2020, p. 76), but they render actors static and fall short of depicting how rela-
tions change over time. Because sociomateriality accounts for processes of
becoming, aspects of dynamism and temporal flow are considered critical
(Orlikowski, 2007, p. 1440). With this in mind, we devised a method to illus-
trate how distributed thinking through making unfolds dynamically,
Figure 2 Combination of studio diaries
Listening to the sociomaterial
11

visualizing it not as a network of static actors but as a meshwork of entangled
trajectories followed by actors moving through time (see Ingold, 2008,p.
212).
5
As we have demonstrated earlier (Vega, M€
akel€
a, Chen, & Seitamaa-
Hakkarainen, 2021), tracing sociomaterial trajectories is an appropriate
method to analyze distributed processes in which all involved actors transform
and are transformed by one another. In other words, it incorporates the tenets
of a performative, relational ontology that amounts to the notion of
becoming-with. Since a fundamental principle of this ontology lies in the con-
dition of indeterminacy (Barad, 2003, p. 815), the method begins by treating all
actors uniformly and indistinctly, assuming no a priori distinction, categoriza-
tion, or hierarchization between them. This means analyzing what actors do
and what is done with them (cf. Matthews et al., 2021, p. 5), or more specif-
ically, how actors matter to one another.
Identifying actors, nonetheless, requires specifying moments of action, and
both procedures necessitate the segmentation of practices into discrete,
observable units (Knight, 2018, p. 209). The discretization of actors and mo-
ments comprises an agential cut needed to understand how certain things and
doings come to matter. To achieve this, we cross-checked both datasets and
analyzed what the researcher envisioned, what he did to make the workshop
happen, what the designers did in the workshop, what they utilized to do
what they did, what they talked about, and what else affected the making of
their shared practice. Analyzing these aspects allowed us to identify ten actors
and twenty-five moments. Table 3 outlines the actors and their trajectories,
whereas Table 4 chronologically recounts the moments and their involved ac-
tors. Zooming into moments 12 and 14, Table 5 (contextualized by Figure 3)
presents two excerpts from Dataset II to exemplify how actors were identified.
It is noteworthy to clarify the seemingly counterintuitive grouping of some ac-
tors presented in Table 3. As stressed above, a sociomaterial analytical lens
does not assume actors to come with inherent assets or qualities but, instead,
sets to elucidate how they acquire their features in action. For example, ideas
(actor G) were considered emergent rather than pre-given; they were not as-
signed to specific actors (i.e., the designers) because no actor was assumed
to possess ideas a priori. The same criterion was applied to cultural conven-
tions (actor I), as the notion of transculturality does not presuppose fixed cul-
tural boundaries or entities with stable cultural characteristics. What this
means is that individuals, ideas, and cultural meanings shape one another
through actions performed in practice. This mutual shaping of actorsdillus-
trated here as the mutual shaping of the workshop materialsdis what
Ingold (2013) calls a process of correspondence (pp. 31, 107).
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Figure 4 renders the processing of the data presented above, taking every
moment as a unit of observation and the making of the practice as the unit
of analysis. It exhibits how the knots of the resulting meshwork are not static
actors but moments that describe ongoing processes of materialization.
Accordingly, actors are depicted as sociomaterial trajectories: they move as
a function of time and can only exist, or rather, become, in relation to one
another. It is also worth noting that the discretization of moments did not
follow the identification of actors or vice-versa. Both procedures were per-
formed concurrently rather than sequentially and required serval rounds of
iteration. In this respect, tracing the meshwork was also a way of thinking
through making that entailed the use of data as a design material. Although
the procedures behind its tracing were partial and subjective (see Knight,
2018), the meshwork visualization is underpinned by the intersubjective docu-
mentation of the design practice (cf. Pedgley, 2007).
One last round of analysis was conducted to make sense of the chronological
progression of the meshwork on a temporal scale. We did this by revisiting Da-
taset I and the video recordings from Dataset II, marking the periods of time
within which every moment of the practice occurred. As a result, we could
visualize all the knots of the meshwork in their corresponding time frame.
Figure 5 presents this visualization, organizing the practice into its two over-
arching phases and clarifying the distribution of the twenty-five moments over
time. The temporal overlap between moments highlights the intersubjective
Table 3 Sociomaterial actors involved in the design practice (i.e., the materials of the workshop): an actor’s trajectory corre-
sponds to the sequence of moments in which it was involved, with each moment being discretized by the emergence of new re-
lations observed among actors
Actor Trajectory
ADesigner A 6-9-11-12-14-15-16-17-18-22-23-25
BDesigner B 7-9-11-12-13-15-16-18-19-21-23-25
CDesigner C 8-9-11-12-13-15-18-19-21-22-23-24-25
DDesigner D 2-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-15-17-18-20-23-24-25
ERed clay 3-4-11-12-18-25
FTools and equipment: workshop supplies, including
resources other than clay and technological devices like
smartphones or printers
3-4-11-16-18-20-21-25
GEmerging ideas: not-yet-embodied thoughts, e.g., intuitions,
desires, and expectations, either featured in talk or captured
in the diaries
2-5-12-15-16-17-19-20-22
HExternal representations: sketches, images, diagrams,
models, and instructions, whether preexisting or generated
during the practice
5-10-14-16-20-21-22-23-24
ICultural conventions: highly situated symbolic meanings and
context-specific forms of shared tacit knowledge
1-13-14
JPeripheral practices: other spheres of activity that supported
the realization of the workshop, such as traditional pot-
making, studio ceramics, or the ongoing work at the
department that made the red clay available to the designers
1-2-3-9-13-14
Listening to the sociomaterial
13

perception of time embedded in the analytical process, and it is detailed in the
next section alongside the rest of the findings.
Table 4 Chronological record of the practice: the line between moments 8 and 9 indicates the transition between phases I and II
Moment Actors involved
1 Occurrence of pottery practices I, J
2 Conceptualization of the workshop D, G, J
3 Availability of supplies E, F, J
4 Selection of supplies D, E, F
5 Ideation of the task and writing of the call for applications D, G, H
6 Selection of Designer A A, D
7 Selection of Designer B B, D
8 Selection of Designer C C, D
9 Introduction between the designers A, B, C, D, J
10 Presentation of the task D, H
11 Familiarization with the supplies through individual acts of making A, B, C, D, E, F
12 Demonstration of personal skills through individual acts of making A, B, C, D, E, G
13 Discussion about different understandings of pot-making B, C, I, J
14 Sharing of personal stories supported with visual materials A, H, I, J
15 Expression of initial expectations A, B, C, D, G
16 Mapping of preliminary ideas A, B, F, G, H
17 Definition of possible strategies to complete the task A, D, G
18 Generation of collaborative prototypes with clay A, B, C, D, E, F
19 Reframing of expectations and redefinition of strategies B, C, G
20 Elaboration of sketches to negotiate the characteristics of the pots D, F, G, H
21 Fabrication of 2D prototypes to assess the feasibility of the sketches B, C, F, H
22 Renegotiation of certain characteristics A, C, G, H
23 Agreement on the final characteristics A, B, C, D, H
24 Planning and scheduling of the production C, D, H
25 Production of the pots A, B, C, D, E, F
Table 5 Identification of actors exemplified by moments 12 and 14: the highlighted text shows how actors were discretized
during the analysis
Data capturing tool Excerpt Actors identified
Tzuyu’s diary
(Figure 3, left)
05.01, Session 2 (moment 12)
We spent today’s session exploring the material. Red clay (actor E)
Everyone was trying a different [i.e., their own] The designers (actors AeD)
approach to forming/handling the clay [.] We were
all curious and not sure how we shall set up the Emerging ideas (actor G)
goals or ways of working together.
Video transcription 07.01, Session 3 (moment 14)
(00:28:21) Erin: Designer A (actor A)
I grew up looking at old amphoras in museums.
They were used to transport whatever in ships, Peripheral practices (actor J)
but now they are of course so valuable. They have
really nice features. This one (Figure 3, right) has External representations (actor H)
a mark on the side, which says which city made it. Cultural conventions (actor I)
Design Studies Vol 88 No. C Month 2023
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4A matter of evolving relations: findings
Thinking is a relational process. As such, it involves connecting “trajectories of
information” described by the doings of multiple actors (Hollan, Hutchins, &
Kirsh, 2000, p. 177). Establishing these connections through collaborative
making magnifies the constitutive entanglement of sociality and materiality:
actors can no longer be considered social or material but become simulta-
neously social and material (Orlikowski, 2007, p. 1437). Another aspect of
this form of relationality is distributed development: thinking does not preexist
within a central processing unit but unfolds as a process of correspondence
(Ingold, 2013). The meshwork presented in Figure 4 synthesizes all these ideas
by depicting a variety of actors, trajectories, and evolving connections, as well
as an overall sense of process distribution.
Here we provide different readings of the meshwork to further elaborate on
how thinking unfolds through sociomaterially distributed acts of making. In
doing so, we shed light on four features of sociomaterial assemblages that war-
rant critical attention in practice-led design research: (1) temporality, (2) con-
tingency, (3) epistemic capability, and (4) analytical agency. These features,
which became visible throughout the tracing of the meshwork, are organized
as findings and contextualized with examples extracted from the workshop. By
zooming in and out of the meshwork (see Nicolini, 2009), we tackle the
Figure 3 Data capturing tools (Tzuyu’s diary and one of the visual materials collected by Erin) used in the example shown above
Listening to the sociomaterial
15

relationship between the four designers’ thinking through making in particular
and practice-led design research as a mode of thinking through making in gen-
eral. Attention is given to why adopting a sociomaterial lens can benefit cur-
rent efforts to analyze own design activity.
Figure 4 Sociomaterial becoming of the design practice: the dashed line (actor D) indicates the trajec tory of the researcher
11, 12
20, 21 21
13, 14,
15, 16
17, 18
23, 24 21, 22
9, 10
19, 205
2
1
2, 3,
4
55
22
6
2
525252525287
Phase I
Workshop preparation
Phase II
Workshop implementation
Indeterminate time frame
1202 yraunaJ :emarf emiT0202 rebmevoN :emarf emiT
Figure 5 Temporal distribution of the design practice: white rectangles indicate, e.g., days, and numbers inscribed inside them correspond to the
moments presented in Figure 4
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4.1 The temporal rhythms of practice
Temporality is key to understanding design processes, so a proper construal of
distributed thinking through making requires clarity on how time is perceived
and organized. Figure 5 shows how some moments of the practice had a rela-
tively short duration (e.g., moments 3, 4, 9, 10, 23, and 24) while others
occurred over the course of several days (i.e., moments 2, 5, 20, 21, and 25).
The fabrication of two-dimensional prototypes to assess the size and shape
of the pots (moment 21, Figure 6), for example, spanned from Tuesday to
Thursday of the second week of the workshop. These days could have counted
as distinct moments, but they became a single knot in the meshwork since no
other relations were observed to emerge in that timespan. Because design ac-
tivity is constituted relationally, an adequate understanding of its processes
cannot rely on predetermined units of measurement. Instead, it is crucial to
observe how units emerge experientially in and through practice. To conceive
of thinking and making as simultaneous processes of the same practical activ-
ity, attention is mandatory to the temporal patterns wherein such activity is
experientially inscribed.
Situations of distributed thinking through making thus afford analytical lenses
that should be attuned not to the temporal scale of thinking but to the rhythms
of sociomaterial practice. Whether thinking unfolds throughout longer or
shorter periods of time, what matters are the ongoing processes of materiali-
zation that enact it. Some of these processes may surpass the length of design
practices (moment 1) or happen regardless of what practitioners do (moment
3), but they are still productive of the sociomaterial trajectories that sustain the
loop of thinking and making. In short, distributed thinking through making
unfolds in clusters of nonlinear, irregularly paced processes of materialization
rather than in steady and neatly synchronized events. This finding underscores
that seemingly uncoordinated timescales matter a lot when thinking through
making is to be examined as a distributed phenomenon.
4.2 The contingency of sociomaterial engagement
Working with the entangled becoming of the social and the material is an
authentic means to disprove the misconception of design practice being a
form-giving activity. Indeed, this way of working accentuates that form is
highly contingent and lies beyond the practitioner’s control (Ingold, 2013;
Redstr€
om, 2017). When design materials transcend physical substances (actor
E) to entangle shared expectations (actor G), established ways of doing things
(actor I), or related-but-unfathomable contexts of activity (actor J), the illu-
sion of form-giving dissipates. Figure 4 highlights the trajectory of the
researcher within an entanglement of this kind, showing how the designing
of the workshop, from ideation (moment 2) to completion (moment 25),
was a sociomaterial negotiation rather than a form-giving process. A similar
situation is captured in the following excerpt from moment 15, when the
Listening to the sociomaterial
17

designers identified that their emerging expectations were another material to
think through and negotiate with.
(01:03:17) Erin: So, do you have any idea of .how do you think this will work
out? I mean, in general .
(01:03:30) Amedeo: I think, right now, everything is possible. We need a direction.
Let’s build something big! [laughs]
(01:03:41) Luis: I know. I didn’t really expect to have the need for a specific
thing to be done so quickly. But now .Yeah, I agree that we
need some sort of direction or something.
(01:04:24) Erin: My expectation is perhaps a bit more abstract .It’s about the
definition of everybody’s input. I don’t think it should be clear-
cut, and I’m very afraid that could happen. I see many different
ideas coming, so why not try as many directions as we feel like
and see how we can make they come together?
(01:04:46) Amedeo: I think that will be impossible to control.
(01:04:51) Erin: Sure, but at least we can see what each of us wants, keep that in
mind, and see what we can do with it.
Akin to how physical materials shape the making of physical artifacts
(Malafouris, 2019), ideas brought forth by practitioners shape the making of
their shared practices. The workshop was conceived by the researcher alone,
but it materialized from the entangled doings of multiple actors. Such doings
Figure 6 Amedeo and Tzuyu preparing a template to fabricate a two-dimensional prototype
Design Studies Vol 88 No. C Month 2023
18

depended on shifting relations that could be adapted but could not have been
anticipated (Orlikowski, 2007). This indicates that even when the sociomate-
rial components of the research setting conform to specific selection criteria,
their sociomateriality will only emerge in actual practice (Barad, 2007).
Although designer-researchers may be in the position to design their research
apparatuses, the practices that enact these apparatuses are made by the corre-
spondence of numerous forces. Practices cannot be designed, but design arti-
factsdsuch as pots or workshopsdinfluence how practices come to be made.
Designer-researchers must then be aware of what and who else makes their
(research) practices, something that is often at risk of remaining unarticulated.
On this note, we argue that taking design practices as units of making helps
magnify the contingent nature of sociomaterial engagement. Unlike physical
artifacts, practicesdin this case the way the workshop was designeddare bun-
dles of shifting relations that cannot be controlled. Understanding the possi-
bilities and limitations of working with something that cannot be controlled,
however, necessitates the kind of experiential knowledge obtained through
making. This is nothing new to practice-led design research, but the shift to-
wards making sociomaterial practices instead of just physical artifacts can
offer designer-researchers a new empirical sensibility to understand
contingency.
4.3 The epistemic role of collaborative making
Making can be a generative design process and not just an instrument of mate-
rialization. Yet, it must be attentively engaged with evolving things and cir-
cumstances (Ingold, 2013). To form a shared understanding towards the
completion of the task, the designers had to listen to the sociomaterial
becoming of multiple actors. Only after experimenting with the clay and the
tools (moment 11), getting acquainted with everyone else’s skills (moment
12), and recognizing their emerging expectations (moment 15) could they start
generating design ideas that seemed intelligible to all (moment 16). Such a
course of action is an example of attentive sociomaterial engagement
(Figure 7). In this example, the generation of ideas depicts a process of distrib-
uted thinking through making (i.e., more-than-individual design reasoning
informed by ongoing processes of materialization) rather than a cumulative
externalization of individually pre-formulated thoughts. Those ideas were iter-
ated in subsequent acts of making, alternating the fabrication of physical ar-
tifacts with the creation of diagrams and sketches.
After several rounds of iteration (moments 17e22), the designers agreed to
produce four identical large pots (moment 23) and decided to take daily turns
to build them. This decision was a time-efficient way to complete the task
based on the sociomaterial limitations of the process: it permitted each of
the designers to participate in the making of every pot, enabled the production
Listening to the sociomaterial
19

of four pots in four days, and allowed the clay to harden in between days so
that the pots would not collapse during the making. Figure 8 captures this
reasoning in a diagrammatic representation, which Tzuyu and the researcher
generated to organize the work ahead (moment 24). The diagram was progres-
sively refined as the pots were built, exposing the entangled processing of mat-
ter and meaning. In this case, the making of the diagram (moment 24) yielded
an external representation (actor H) that served as an adaptive tool (actor F)
during the production of the pots (moment 25, Figure 9).
The examples offered above illustrate the integral role of making in design
reasoning, be it by creating representations, physical artifacts, or ways of orga-
nizing practical activity. This mode of reasoning is inherently subjective and
typically remains within the practitioner (Sch€
on, 1983), but situations of
distributed thinking through making demand it to be intelligible to others. Per-
sonal, taken-for-granted perspectives embodied by individuals (actors AeD)
are then made public and called into question (Groten, 2022). At the level
of design practice, situations like this permit the socialization of tacit knowl-
edge (moments 12e14), which in turn allows for the synergistic creation of
new cognitive frameworks (moments 17 and 20) and the intersubjective eval-
uation thereof (moments 19 and 22). At the level of research, they support
articulation, interrogate subjective metrics, and force designer-researchers to
Figure 7 An example of sociomaterial engagement: making individual models allowed the designers to understand one another’s skills (moment
12); this understanding was integral to the collaborative generation of feasible design ideas (moment 16)
Design Studies Vol 88 No. C Month 2023
20

look beyond their experiential knowledge. Ultimately, analyzing own but
more-than-individual design activity confers designer-researchers a new re-
sponsibility: to ensure that they include the perspectives of other designers
in the knowledge-production process (cf. Luck, 2018;Pedgley, 2007).
4.4 The drawing of analytical boundaries
Including different perspectives in practice-led design research does not save it
from being exclusionary. Designing implicates the drawing of boundaries
(Bjørn & Østerlund, 2014), and this aspect is critical while examining how
design practice leads the research process. Throughout the making of the
workshop, design choices were ubiquitous. These involved, to name a few,
ideating a task (moment 2), selecting participants (moments 6e8), defining
collaboration strategies (moment 17), and agreeing on the characteristics of
the pots (moment 23). All of them constituted boundary-drawing moments
that created certain conditions of possibility at the expense of excluding others
(see Groten, 2022). By no means does this observation intend to equate design
with research, but it serves to remark that both activities entail processes of
materialization that have ontological consequences. Consider, for example,
the following excerpt from moment 17, when Erin and the researcher excluded
the idea of making cylindrical pots, something that had been pondered as a
possible strategy to complete the workshop task.
(00:49:02) Luis: What about the cylinder? I think that was a great idea.
(00:49:07) Erin: I oppose the cylinder.
(00:49:09) Luis: Really?!.. Why?
(00:49:12) Erin: Because that’s too simple .You are the researcher here, but we
are not. We are here for the practice, so whatever we make has to
be meaningful for everybody.
(00:49:29) Luis: Yeah, that makes sense.
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
24 Pot 1Moment
AB
Pot 2 Pot 3 Pot 4
CDABCDAB CDABCD
Figure 8 Organization of the production process (redrawn for clarity): letters AeD correspond to the designers, and shaded rectangles indicate
the turns they had to take to build their part of every pot; the process was planned for four days (Monday to Thursday of the last week of the
workshop), leaving one extra day to manage unanticipated situations or have a longer time to finalize the pots
Listening to the sociomaterial
21

Although this moment did not produce any physical outcomes, it constituted a
process of materialization because it had consequences on how the workshop
evolved (i.e., it really mattered). Different processes of materialization produce
different material realities; as new realities emerge, new processes of material-
ization become possible (see Figure 4). When such processes entangle practice
and research, agential cuts are needed to clarify what is done by design and
how it is being researched. These cuts typify two types of boundary-drawing
agendas (Bjørn & Østerlund, 2014;Sadokierski, 2020): one that, as practi-
tioners, designers pursue to reduce the complexity of design work (e.g., by
defining collaboration strategies) and another that, as researchers, they set
to analyze this type of complexity (e.g., by discretizing actors and generating
meshwork visualizations). In design practice, situations of distributed thinking
through making necessitate the drawing of boundaries to negotiate the pro-
duction of meaning. In practice-led design research, the challenge is to account
for how the drawing of these boundaries is tied to the analytical agency that
designer-researchers exert to decide what comes to matter (cf. Barad,
2003,2007).
Distributed thinking through making is an active doing that can neither pre-
cede design practice nor exist outside of it. However, determining what counts
as ‘outside’ (e.g., what to exclude from the analysis) is a choice tantamount to
an agential cut. Agential cuts need attention because they render specific res-
olutions of phenomena (Bjørn & Østerlund, 2014), meaning that depending on
Figure 9 The researcher building Pot No. 3 (moment 25, Tuesday) and Erin finalizing Pot No. 4 (moment 25, Friday)
Design Studies Vol 88 No. C Month 2023
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the cuts one performs, different qualities of sociomaterial assemblages can be
perceived and acted upon. What this indicates is that sociomaterial assem-
blages in practice-led design researchdin this case the workshop, the practice,
and the meshworkdare also active doings generated through cycles of atten-
tive engagement and experimentation (see Dixon, 2020, pp. 78e9), in which
analytical distinctions are made rather than found. Coming full circle to our
argument of the designerly ability to think generatively, this last point cements
our analytical procedure as another way of listening to the sociomaterial: it re-
iterates our pragmatist stance to explore what the workshop design, the collab-
orative practice, and the meshwork visualization were capable of producing.
5Discussion
By taking an insider’s perspective to analyze the collaborative making of a
design practice, we have presented a practice-led design study of the socioma-
teriality of distributed thinking through making. The study is relevant to cur-
rent understandings of the embodied and situated nature of design activity,
though it pursues a slightly different track by focusing on the relational and
generative character of designing. In this respect, we have delineated how
distributed thinking through making unfolds in (1) nonlinear sequences of
emerging relations, (2) contingent ways of engaging with the entangled
becoming of the social and the material, (3) modes of reasoning that contest
individualized knowledge regimes, and (4) a series of choices that create
certain conditions of possibility at the expense of excluding others.
The study illustrates one possible way of adopting a sociomaterial lens in
practice-led design research, which we have empirically explored by including
other designers in the making of the design practice that leads the research pro-
cess. Instead of attending to the qualities of pre-given design materials, we
have concentrated on the emergent features of collaborative making. This shift
has allowed us to recalibrate the onto-epistemological dimension of practice in
practice-led design research, yielding novel insights into the entangled position
from which designer-researchers resolve to operate. The results reported here-
in may therefore diverge from those obtained in practice-led studies focusing
squarely on physical material engagement. Our focus has been not on physical
materials but on socially embedded processes of materialization, which, as we
have argued, need special attention when they involve design decisions made
by designer-researchers.
To further unpack this issue, we have emphasized the need to clarify how
research apparatuses are designed and how agential cuts render phenomena
intelligible. An example of this is how the workshop design implicated the in-
clusion and exclusion of supplies, participants, and conditions of participa-
tion. The emphasis on the apparatus and the cuts it affords has aimed at
providing a better comprehension of how and when boundaries emerge. Our
Listening to the sociomaterial
23

findings support the view that boundaries do not precede design (or research)
activity but are dynamically configured in (research) practice (Bjørn &
Østerlund, 2014). Not only is this observation relevant to the explication of im-
plicit design choices, but it is also crucial for design studies seeking to under-
stand the material effects of decision-making processes. These ideas are not
new, but they rarely feature in studies of design activity (Fischer,
€
Ostlund,
& Peine, 2021), let alone in practice-led design research. We have consequently
called for increased awareness of how decisions made in practice affect
research and vice-versa.
This aspect makes it worth discussing the choice of our method of analysis and
the limitations of our research design. Adopting a sociomaterial lens affords
the sensitivity to recognize, but at the same time decenter, the experiential
knowledge of designer-researchers. The primary method through which we
have crystallized this idea is the visualization of a meshwork. For practice-
led design research, the power of meshwork visualizations resides in the pos-
sibility of making tacit connections explicit. Though this method can support
the analysis of individual design activity, its benefits are significantly more
evident when used in collaborative settings. The setting designed for this study,
nonetheless, has limited transferability to practices of similar scales and char-
acteristics. Further research is needed to examine how distributed thinking
through making unfolds in larger, smaller, and more natural or artificial
environments.
While our analytical approach is comprehensive in terms of how the design
practice unfolded, it is superficial with respect to what exactly happened in
each moment of the workshop. The purpose of this study was not to analyze
specific moments but to generate an “evidence base” documenting how the
workshop was designed (see Pedgley, 2007, p. 480). Investigating specific mo-
ments of design activity requires different methodological approaches offering
distinct units of analysis and levels of granularity. Sociomateriality may be
limited in this regard, but it offers exceptional insights to analyze practices
as evolving units. We therefore want to highlight the partial, unstable, and
incomplete nature of practices that are in the making. The workshop developed
in this study only reached a prototype stage and could arguably benefit from
further iteration. Identifying how iterating apparatuses can produce more
nuanced understandings of sociomaterial practices seems to be a fruitful
avenue for future research.
The study is also limited in terms of exploring distributed thinking through
making beyond knowing and doing. Among other things, we have shed light
on the epistemic capability of sociomaterial assemblages and the ontological
consequences of bounding their sociomateriality. However, none of our find-
ings elucidate how working with the entangled becoming of the social and the
material carries implications outside epistemology or ontology. An important
Design Studies Vol 88 No. C Month 2023
24

part of our data, though left unanalyzed, suggests that situations of distributed
thinking through making involve care, affective labor, and intersubjective
judgments about ethics and aesthetics. These aspects are central to contempo-
rary debates in performative and relational inquiry (Gherardi, 2017;Puig de la
Bellacasa, 2012), so more studies are needed to illuminate their effects on
research conducted through more-than-individual design activity.
To conclude, we want to reiterate the rationale behind our contribution.
Design practice does not start by looking at clearly defined substances with
inherent properties or qualities. Instead, it is through actions performed in
practice that social doings, material things, individuals, or artifacts become
differentiated from one another and acquire intelligible features of their
own. Understanding how these actions unfold and produce specific resolutions
of reality requires a strong focus on processes of materialization. To this end,
we have addressed recent calls to reconnect design studies with making (e.g.,
Kamath, 2020;Knight & Vardouli, 2015;Luck, 2018). Our contribution lies
in facilitating this reconnection by incorporating a sociomaterial reading of
practice-led design research. Design studies and sociomateriality already agree
that processes of materialization matter. Yet, we insist that getting to know
how they matter is only possible by attentively engaging with them in practice.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or
personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported
in this paper.
Data availability
Part of the data can be made available upon request.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Academy of Finland (project numbers 331778
and 331763) and the Mexican National Council of Science and Technology
(scholar number 567923). The first author would like to express his gratitude
to designers Erin T€
urko
glu, Amedeo Martines, and Tzuyu Chen for their
commitment to the Transcultural Pottery workshop. We also want to thank
the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback and
suggestions.
Notes
1. Consider, for example, the special issue dedicated to computational making, published
by this journal (Volume 41) in 2015, or the biannual conference organized by the Special
Interest Group on Experiential Knowledge (EKSIG) of the Design Research Society,
launched in 2009.
2. Our construal of practice-led design research aligns with the idea of “a researcher under-
taking a design project subservient to stated research aims and objectives” (Pedgley,
2007, p. 463), which has also been described in this journal as “constructive design
Listening to the sociomaterial
25

research” (Stompff, van Bruinessen, & Smulders, 2022) and “research through design”
(Sadokierski, 2020). Within this framework, we use the terms ‘design practice’ to refer
to “the ways in which design professionals conduct their work” and ‘knowledge’ to indi-
cate an “understanding about the world that can be communicated to others” (Stappers
& Giaccardi, 2017, S. 43.1.1).
3. Our argument here is that although this type of experiential knowledge is exceptionally
valuable, it dwells in individualized frames of reference and tends to downplay the impor-
tance of social practice as a site of research.
4. This point also concerns the necessary but not always explicit distinction between the
terms ‘socio-material’ (spelled with a hyphen) and ‘sociomaterial’ (spelled with no hy-
phen). The former is commonly associated with studies wherein the social and the mate-
rial comprise separate analytical categories, echoing the methodological traditions of,
e.g., activity theory and ethnomethodology. The latter signals an ontological positioning
wherein the entangled becoming of the social and the material constitutes the funda-
mental unit of analysis. A recent study published in this journal (Matthews et al.,
2021) pertinently employs the former to investigate the qualities of certain design mate-
rials and what designers do with them. This paper, in turn, adheres to the latter to shed
light not on designers or materials but on designing as a practice performed by the indis-
soluble unity of designers-and-materials.
5. Ingold borrows the term meshwork from philosopher Henri Lefebvre (1991) to describe a
web of entangled threads that captures the open-ended essence of making. In contrast to
a network, which is self-contained and made by connecting dots, a meshwork is
open-ended and made by interweaving lines. Such a distinction, he argues, points to
the difference between ‘distribution’ and ‘becoming,’ two processes respectively associ-
ated with pre-defined actors versus emerging relations. We refer to distribution (as in
distributed thinking through making) not to denote the pre-existence of dots to be con-
nected but to indicate that analyzing a meshwork requires cutting it to discretize its en-
tangled threads. These threads are the actors’ trajectories whereby thinking through
making becomes distributed. Distribution, in this sense, is also emergent, but it is only
made intelligible as a result of performing agential cuts on the meshwork.
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