Current iteration of the research question: How does sustained engagement with multi-actor bread baking generate methodologies for symbiotic conviviality that enable regenerative co-existing survivals?
This practice-led design research develops symbiotic conviviality as a theoretical and ethical reorientation of design practice, from anthropocentric control toward emergent making-with other-than-human actors. The empirical foundation is Panicuocoli (2020–2024), a commercial sourdough bakery in Helsinki that I operated as both research site and method. Working with locally sourced grains, sourdough cultures, and seasonal conditions, the bakery embraced the inherent variabilities of local agricultural cycles. The research examines what emerges when design practice is understood as relational, situated, and multi-actor.
A key insight arose when sudden flour changes revealed how knowledge becomes through co-existence rather than mastery, prompting a proposed shift in design from specifications to acknowledgement: nurturing the conditions for forms to emerge rather than imposing predefined outcomes. From with(in) this practice, the article-based upcoming thesis, Symbiotic conviviality for co-existing survivals, develops interconnected contributions that address how design might engage with more-than-human agencies in ways that enable regenerative co-existence. These ideas also inform my teaching.
Core Concepts
- Symbiotic conviviality
- An ethical and methodological stance extending critical theorist Ivan Illich's conviviality, feminist scholar Donna Haraway's sympoiesis, and biologist Lynn Margulis's symbiogenesis into design practice. Making as collaborative survival. Cum-vivere (living-with) understood as a living, fluid, emergent commons where dualistic boundaries dissolve into practices of care and shared survival. Nordes 2025 paper ↗
- Acknowledgement
- An epistemic practice defined through cum-vivere (living-with) and con-stare (being-with). A repositioning of the knowers-in-the-practice: being present with material changes rather than attempting to master them. Knowledge is co-produced in ways that transcend human temporality, understanding, and intelligibility. What is inscrutable becomes enabling rather than impeding. BICCS 2025 short paper ↗
- Emergent prototype
- A design situation where material doings (practices) and material outcomes (prototypes) are intertwined and co-constitutive, with fluid, unstable, and undesigned boundaries. The concept collapses the space between prototyping as practice and prototyping a practice. The bakery originated organically through making rather than being synthetically designed as a research site. Nordes 2025 paper ↗ (full methodological development forthcoming)
The article-based Thesis (tentatively Symbiotic conviviality for co-existing survivals) comprises at least these three publications:
- Form as relational process → Nordes 2025 (published)
- Acknowledgement as epistemic practice → BICCS 2025 + full article under review
- Emergent prototyping methodology → forthcoming
Supervisor: Professor Maarit Mäkelä, Empirica research group, Aalto University.
Advisor: Research Assistant Professor Luis Vega, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Advisor: Associate Professor Julia Lohmann, Aalto University
Publications
- Acknowledging the Agencies of Others as an Epistemic Practice Gianluca Giabardo, Luis Vega (2025). Biennial International Conference for the Craft Sciences.
What happens when a designer stops trying to master materials and starts acknowledging their agencies instead? This paper proposes acknowledgement as an epistemic practice — a way of knowing that emerges not through control, but through recognising what exceeds human comprehension.
View publication ↗ - The Bread Without Form: Attuning to Relational Ways of Making Through Convivial Baking Practice Gianluca Giabardo, Luis Vega, Maarit Mäkelä (2025). Nordes 2025: Relational Design.
What if form is not something a designer gives, but something that emerges through co-existence? This paper follows a bakery practice where sourdough bread becomes a lens for rethinking design, making, and materiality as relational and symbiotic processes.
doi:10.21606/nordes.2025.6 ↗ - Making Things That Change: Reconsidering the Fluid Nature of Creative Productions in Research Through Art, Design, and Craft Luis Vega, Julia Valle Noronha, Gary Markle, Riikka Latva-Somppi, Sara Hulkkonen, Priska Falin, Hanna-Kaisa Korolainen, Maiju Suomi, Gianluca Giabardo (2024). Research in Arts and Education, 2024(1), 152–165.
Research artefacts in art, design, and craft are rarely fixed objects — they shift, decay, and transform. This paper from the Empirica research group reconsiders what it means for creative productions to be fluid, proposing frameworks for engaging with change as an inherent quality of practice-led research.
doi:10.54916/rae.142574 ↗
Affiliation
Doctoral Researcher, School of Art Design and Architechture, Department of Design, Aalto University
Empirica Research Group