Luis Garcia’s doctoral research emerged from a simple but consequential observation: the ambitious promises of Carnegie Mellon University’s transition design and European Public Design did not account for the institutional realities of the Global South. As an Ecuadorian designer who has worked across Latin America and North America, Dr. Garcia questioned how long-term societal transitions could be pursued within public institutions marked by political instability, resource constraints, and enduring colonial power relations.
Working with public designers across Latin America and the Caribbean, and through a ten-month collaboration with the Municipality of Quito, Ecuador, Dr. Garcia documented how transition-oriented work is sustained through relationships of trust, situated judgment, and everyday acts of institutional care. His research reveals that public-sector transitions rarely follow linear roadmaps. Instead, it unfolds through continuous negotiation between structural constraints and the creative capacities of designers working from within them.
The dissertation develops concepts such as designing from handiness, ecologies of relational practices, and institutional affect, culminating in the Unfinished Design Model—a framework that reimagines public transitions as ongoing, relational, and politically situated processes. By bringing Ecuadorian and broader Latin American experiences to the center of transition design scholarship, Dr. Luis Garcia demonstrates that the most valuable design knowledge often emerges not despite institutional fragility, but through the inventive ways designers learn to navigate it.
