Maria Dimitriou-Tsaknaki is a graduate of the School of Architecture of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Her research thesis is titled "Bernard Stiegler’s critique of technology" and was supervised by Lia Yoka, while her design thesis is titled "Circus as member of a deformed urban body: Call for collection and reuse of artificial matter" and was supervised and guided by Athina Vitopoulou and Nantia Kalara. Her interests relate to theories of technology and the commons, alternative systems of knowledge and technique, and the relationship between research and practice, theory and material experimentation.

She has worked as an architect in Greece and, for a short time, in France. During her collaboration with the organization Atelier Fil and her stay in Nantes, she engaged in research on the participatory reuse of materials as an educational process for knowledge sharing and community building. The results of the research were presented at the SMOOTH conference in May 2023. She is a member of the Life After Growth summer school team, a summer school focused on degrowth, combining theoretical inquiry with the practical knowledge of groups whose actions are based on the commons. Her writings can be found here (Distributed Design), here (degrowth.info), and here (SMOOTH).

The PhD research focuses on the exploration of alternative systems and frameworks of technological production as models of the commons (domains, infrastructure, knowledge, and values).

For the purposes of the dissertation, case studies will be analyzed and a field research program will be designed. The dissertation will examine the production of artifacts and technical objects in terms of raw materials, manufacturing techniques, and applied arts, while focusing on how these epistemologies approach knowledge and know-how, community, place, the environment, and time. Beyond individual technical objects, the context, systems, and production processes will be examined.

Adopting theories of commons as a lens, the aim is to analyze these systems of technical creation as alternative models of social and ecological organization, of relationship between the human and technical bodies, and multi-skilling.

The research aims to contribute to a critical examination of technology and to the search for and promotion of technological frameworks as alternative, commons-based models of production.

madimitriouth.gr