Head of the Institute of Design and Visual Interaction, Royal Danish Academy
Anders Thulin
Talk
TABULA RASA - A deliberate reset
What if becoming a designer begins not with learning how to make things better, but with questioning what “better” means? Our tools now produce answers faster than ever, yet better is never neutral — every idea of it carries assumptions about what matters and for whom. A tabula rasa was a Roman wax tablet scraped clean to be written on again; at the Royal Danish Academy, it is how visual design and interaction students begin. Before designing anything, they study how the world around them has already been designed, step away from it, and ask what they believe is worth designing for — returning months later to see what has moved and what has held. Anders draws on this experiment to ask how designers develop the judgement methods alone cannot provide, and why every designer may, now and then, return to the blank slate.
Profile
Anders Thulin is Head of the Institute of Design and Visual Interaction at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen, leading education and research in visual design, interaction and media. Trained as an architect and designer, he spent more than a decade as Head of Design at the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR), developing large-scale design systems for media platforms, cultural institutions and public services. He is a member of the Danish Design Council, a jury member for the Danish Design Award 2026, Jury President for the European Design Awards 2026, and a Fellow in Yale’s Life Worth Living network. His current work asks how designers can create meaningful resistance, renewed attention and more human forms of progress in a time shaped by AI and frictionless systems.