Author: Mathias Poulsen
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A Love Letter to Writing
I recently shared a ‘break-up letter‘, where I broke up with writing. It was an example for a writing workshop with students at Kolding School of Design. Today we worked with love letters, and I quickly jotted one down while the students were also writing: Dear writing, I know I’ve been hard on you at…
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Breaking up with Writing
This is an example of a ‘break-up letter’ I wrote for a playful writing exercise at the Exploring Design Professions internship course at Kolding School of Design 2024. We used the familiar method of break-up letters and love letters to explore both what we hate and love about writing, what makes writing deeply challenging and…
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Dreaming about Writing
‘The work starts to feel like work, and for most writers that is the smooch of death. Writing is at its best – always, always, always – when it is a kind of inspired play for the writer. I can write in cold blood if I have to, but I like it best when it’s…
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Writing as if every word could change the world
‘Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all—ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must…
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What we know
“what you know (or might eventually know) might be exceeded by that which what you know (or might eventually know) cannot contain’ Marisol de la Cadena If we only do what we know,Resting in the comfort of certainty,Measuring with familiar yardsticks,What we know is all we’re ever going to get.And what we know is not…
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Drifting by Friction
I never planned to submit anything for the Design Research Society conference in Boston, because the deadline in the fall of 2023 was just too close to the final deadline for my PhD. At one point, my lovely colleague Helle Marie sent a kind reminder to the play group at Design School Kolding about the…
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The Junk Playground as Agora: Designing for Playful Democratic Frictions
Here you can download my PhD thesis, ‘The Junk Playground as Agora: Designing for Playful Democratic Frictions’:
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For the Love of Reading
‘For though reading seems so simple—a mere matter of knowing the alphabet—it is indeed so difficult that it is doubtful whether anybody knows anything about it.’ Virginia Woolf We often seem to think reading is a simple thing, if not downright banal. We pretend that if we know the letters, if we speak the language,…
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What is a Career Anyway?
Ever since I finished my MA in Media Studies, 16 years ago (!), I have resisted the idea of having or pursuing a career. I have merely been playing a lot, messing around, doing stuff I found exciting and potentially helpful, but I never thought about any of that as constituting a ‘career’. It somehow…
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Small Wonders
I remember reading this claim about Bowie that his life was a ‘rebuke to cynicism’ and isn’t that just the most beautiful thing? I am certainly no stranger to the sarcasm, cynicism, bitterness, envy and general sense of despair that haunts us all. It is so easy to give in to, to be swept away…