Mads Nygaard Folkmann is an assistant research professor at the Danish Centre for Design Research and associated with the Master’s Programme in Design.

Mads Nygaard Folkmann’s current research project is entitled Design and imagination. The invisible space of possibility in design. In this project he investigates what happens as a designer’s vision is transformed into a product that can be perceived and used by others.

Once a designer releases a work and others begin to use it, the work takes on a life of its own, which is outside the designer’s control. Some of the questions that Mads Nygaard Folkmann’s research project addresses: How and to what extent does a work reflect the vision held by the work’s creator? What factors must be present for a work to become ground-breaking in the sense that it alters people’s perception of reality to some extent? And how might this be influenced by what occurs in the transformation from idea to work?

One of Mads Nygaard Folkmann’s goals is to identify phases in the design process through interviews with designers and studies of their work with specific projects. With this project he seeks to contribute to the development of new theory and knowledge about the nature of design work and about the workings of imagination in design processes; theory and knowledge that might be beneficial in the long run, not least in design education.

Mads Nygaard Folkmann Ph.D. dissertation from 2007, Mulighedsrum. Poetisk Imagination i den europæiske romantik (Spaces of Possibility. Poetic Imagination in European Romanticism) took its point of departure in analyses of the writers Novalis, Keats and Stagnelius. It is some of the perspectives from this dissertation that he is seeking to explore further in his design research. The concept “space(s) of possibility” refers to that dimension of new meaning that arises when the imagination is activated – whether the intent is an artistic or a philosophical investigation of the limits of possibility, or whether it is to generate new possibilities for human interaction with or recognition of the world through a design object.

Mads Nygaard Folkmann’s approach to working with design and design research is largely based on the perspective of communication. He has worked as a writer and a project manager in a variety of contexts. Articles by Mads Nygaard Folkmann on design and designers are available, among other places, through his profile at the READ web site and in the webzine Mind Design.

Mads Nygaard Folkmann took a master’s degree in literature studies in 2000 and a Ph.D. in 2007, both from the University of Copenhagen.