Mathias Poulsen

Play Activist & Researcher @ Designskolen Kolding

Stuff I thought about recently

  • The voice of objects

    The voice of objects

    Let’s talk a bit about objects, materials, artifacts. I decided to narrow my exploration of play as democratic participation down to the arena of “skrammellegepladser”, AKA junk or adventure playgrounds, for a number of reasons. I am particularly motivated by the social, embodied forms of play, where players interact with each other, materials and objects,…

  • Experimenting with experiments

    A new beginning? Today is my first day as PhD student, which feels a bit funny. As Camilla said in the morning when I left, hardly concealing her laughter: “have a nice first day of school” (when we met each other, she had just handed in her own dissertation and now, 9 years later, I’m…

  • An open invitation

    An open invitation

    I recently wrote the first post about my upcoming PhD project, “Designing for Playful Democratic Participation”, which I’m extremely excited about. I ended the post with one of my Freire quotes and an invitation to play along: “For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention…

  • Welcome to my PhD project

    Welcome! With this first post, I kick off my PhD blog, where I aim to share news about my project, “Designing for Playful Democratic Participation”, whenever I can. The project starts on December 1st and will be situated in the Lab for Social Design at Designschool Kolding. In the project, I will explore play as democratic…