Luis Vega
Biography
Dr. Luis Vega is a design practitioner, researcher, and educator dedicated to bridging the gap between high-quality practice and rigorous research. His work concentrates on the methodological potential of collective acts of making for knowledge production in design. This interest took him to pursue a practice-led PhD at Aalto University, where he wrote an article-based thesis on the sociomateriality of collaborative and distributed creative processes. He currently serves as a Research Assistant Professor at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, School of Design. Previously, he directed the BA Design Program at Mexico City’s Tecnológico de Monterrey and taught research methods across various universities.
Photo credit: Luis Vega
Translocal Pottery
2021–22
Remote collaboration project
Photographs, geospatial visualizations, conversations, video stills, and locally foraged wild clays from Montreal, Milan, Córdoba, Helsinki, Singapore, and Melbourne
Potters:
Claudia Lau
Jeff Khoo
Luis Vega
Mie Kim
Nina Salsotto Cassina
Sol Carranza Sieber
1. Pot 1 (the speckled one)
Hand coiled pot
Wild clay and rocks from Embalse del Río Tercero, Argentina
Potter: Sol Carranza Sieber
2. Pot 2 (the orange one)
Hand coiled pot
Wild clays from Otaniemi and Kultela, Finland
Potter: Luis Vega
This visual display presents the research methods developed in the last design experiment of Luis Vega’s doctoral thesis. The experiment, Translocal Pottery (2021–22), was a remote project organized in six locations during the covid-19 pandemic. It explores collective pot-making across spatiotemporal divides as a diffractive methodological approach for practice-led research, foregrounding the material effects of doing the same differently and illustrating how to investigate ‘practice’ as a shared thing in the making. The display documents how this practice came into being, decentering the perspective of the practitioner-researcher to account for multiple voices and positionalities. Documented here are pots made of locally foraged wild clays along with photographs, geospatial visualizations, conversations, and video stills. These artifacts constitute methodological devices that functioned as means of diffraction in action: they served to investigate how social and material boundaries are never fixed or predetermined but continually negotiated in practice.
