Luis Garcia
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Luis Garcia
What is Design?
 

Research

 
 
SAMPLES OF FULL DOCUMENT

“designing between worlds: a reckoning with the unfinished condition of public design transitions”

Transition-oriented design scholarship positions public institutions as agents of long-term, systemic, and place-based transformation. Yet, in Global South contexts, this work unfolds within public-sector environments shaped by structural power asymmetries, political volatility, geopolitical hierarchies, and resource constraints that delimit what forms of change are possible. Although public and transition-oriented design scholarship has advanced ambitious frameworks for addressing complex societal challenges, it has paid less attention to how these institutional and geopolitical conditions shape the durability of transition efforts within the state. This research investigates how public designers cultivate, negotiate, and sustain transition-oriented practice across asymmetrical worlds shaped by institutional power, geopolitical hierarchies, relational infrastructures, and the affective and material conditions that both enable and constrain public-sector work. 

The dissertation is organized as a multi-sited methodological assemblage that integrates design-for-policy workshops, dialogues with public designers in Latin America and the Caribbean, a ten-month participatory collaboration aimed at cultivating transition-oriented design capabilities within a municipal department in Quito, Ecuador, and a reflexive positional inquiry into the author’s formation as a designer working across Global South and Global North contexts. These sites illuminate the tension between ambitions for systemic transition and the institutional realities of political volatility, limited resources, and hierarchical governance. They show how this tension shapes organizational structures and professional identities, and how public designers navigate it in practice.

While public designers already work in deeply situated and relational ways, these practices remain undertheorized within both public design and transition-oriented design scholarship. Building on this tension, the dissertation develops the following orientations: (1) structural power, articulated as a co-evolving area of transition-oriented design, to account for how historical, political, and institutional forces shape what forms of design action become possible or constrained in public design transition projects; (2) designing from handiness, which describes how public designers mobilize existing knowledge, practices, material conditions, and relationships to work within institutional fragility and sustain collective action over time; (3) ecologies of relational practices (relacionamientos), which highlight how public design transitions are carried through networks of trust, care, translation, and coordination that extend beyond discrete projects; and (4) institutional affect, which captures how shared sensibilities circulating within organizations influence the durability, legitimacy, and direction of public design efforts.

The orientations culminate in the Unfinished Design Model, an empirically grounded framework for understanding public design transitions as ongoing, negotiated, and structurally conditioned processes rather than linear programs of institutional reform. The model explains how public designers engage institutional power, sustain collaboration across asymmetrical worlds, and pursue more just and contextually grounded societal transitions from within the contradictions that define public-sector life.

Access the full dissertation here.

 
 

Understanding the designer’s role in Latin American Public Sector Innovation Labs. Masters Thesis

This project explores Public Sector Innovation Labs (PSI Labs) in the Latin American context with a particular focus on designer’s contributions. PSI Labs provide a fantastic opportunity for governments to experiment and innovate how public services are delivered to citizens and improve public institutions’ operations. PSI Labs are becoming increasingly visible, but research has mainly focused on PSI Labs in Europe and North America. Moreover, research has also concentrated on PSI Labs as an institution but not on the people working in them. This thesis attempts to contribute to this growing body of research by studying the particularities of operating PSI Labs in Latin America and design/ers contributions in a space that, according to some proponents, can play an important role in addressing pressing social challenges. By engaging with designers and public servants from other disciplines through semi-structured interviews, this thesis presents insights and proposes future directions that could strengthen PSI Labs structures in Latin America and design contributions. Finally, research findings are synthesized in the form of a Giga map that includes the following themes: challenges, best practices, ideal conditions, expert design, learning opportunities for designers and other public servants, and qualities and expertise of people working in Latin American PSI Labs.

 
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Publications

 
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