Transfer of Design Knowledge

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INTERVIEW Cross-aesthetic studies at the University of Copenhagen with an internship at MoMA in New York, a job as a museum curator at the Danish art museum Trap­holt, and a Ph.D. from the Kolding School of Design. These are the corner stones in Trine Brun Petersen’s career. Next, from her position at University College Sealand, she will be transferring knowledge from the design discipline to the field of education.

By Hans Emborg Bünemann

With her Ph.D. dissertation about design as an ideological and behaviour-regulating phenomenon Trine Brun Petersen has contributed to the growing emphasis on academic approaches in the design discipline in Denmark that has been a strong trend since 2003. In the future, she will also contribute to the design discipline on a practical level through a position at University College Sealand where, among other things, she will be using user-involvement methods derived from design to create new learning approaches in the study programmes.
“The design discipline has a good tradition of importing and applying theory and methods from many different knowledge disciplines. I look forward to being involved in transferring knowledge from the design discipline to the educational discipline, where we will be using digital technologies to develop new ways of teaching,” says Trine Brun Petersen.

Design Is Both Aesthetics and Influence

Trine’s interest in design was sparked during a visit to the University of Copenhagen, where as part of her MA studies she did a one-year specialty programme in design under Associate Professor Lars Dybdahl. As part of her cross-aesthetic studies she did an internship with curator Paula Antonelli in the design department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Since her graduation in 2003, she has done an external lectureship in the University of Copenhagen programme that she herself had recently graduated from as well as an interesting job as a curator at the Danish art, craft and design museum Trapholt. Here she was involved in setting up exhibitions that would make the museum visit rewarding to various groups of visitors.
“In exhibitions of design objects, it’s not just form and aesthetics that are being put on display,” she explains. “For example, the exhibition may also shed light on the use of the object or the way it affects its surroundings and our lives.”
The issue of the capacity of design to affect human behaviour is the topic of her Ph.D. dissertation Statsfængslet Østjylland som social teknologi – en diskussion af design som et ideologisk og adfærdsregulerende fænomen (The Danish state prison Statsfængslet Østjylland as social technology – a discussion of design as an ideological and behaviour-regulating phenomenon) that Trine Brun Petersen defended at the Kolding School of Design on 1 October 2010.