Luis Vega
Master of Arts, Doctoral Researcher
Designer-researcher Luis Vega specializes in cross-cultural collaboration. Informed by the dynamics of people, places, and processes, his work employs collective acts of making as a means to investigate ways of socializing knowledge through materiality. In addition to running an award-winning practice, he teaches design research and speaks at conferences. His projects have been published widely and exhibited in galleries, museums, fairs, and biennials in cities like Hong Kong, London, Milan, New York, and Tokyo.
In Empirica, Luis investigates processes of 'distributed thinking through making'—a term he coined to simultaneously articulate the topic of his doctoral thesis and a programmatic approach tailored to study that topic. The thesis sets out to offer a methodological contribution to the field of practice-led design research, specifically by delineating how it can decenter the designer-researcher from the investigative process and account for the epistemic role of making beyond the scale of individual practice. Luis’s research also contributes to the MakerStudioPeda project, an ongoing investigation into the role of materiality, maker practices, and design studio pedagogy in the digital age. The project is funded by the Academy of Finland and conducted jointly with the University of Helsinki in four Nordic countries.