Research Catalogue

This thesis explores how late-diagnosed autistic individuals and their close circle can redesign their relationship after their diagnosis through communication that aligns with autistic ways of being. Grounded in the neurodiversity paradigm, the social model of disability, and the double empathy problem, the research combines interviews, co-creation sessions, and visual storytelling to uncover emotional and relational dynamics during post-diagnosis identity shifts. Through a neurodivergent lens—rooted in sensory awareness, pattern recognition, and visual thinking—this work challenges deficit-based narratives and proposes a compassionate, co-created communication framework. The goal is not assimilation but mutual understanding: enabling autistic individuals to embrace their authentic selves while guiding loved ones to meet them with compassion and openness. Ultimately, the project reimagines design as a tool for creating connection, not correction—honouring difference, restoring balance, and building inclusive systems where all ways of being are valid, visible, and valued.

In our exploration of the spatiality of language and, specifically, the activation of the site where writing "makes" rather than takes place, we propose a multilayered experience of the book as an object, as well as a geometrical, topological, and especially performative space, which we understand as an "ecology of the book". Extending this practice beyond the book's margins, yet simultaneously embedding it within the material and technical affordances of the book’s medial articulations, we evoke a "new" ecology—one unfolding alongside the interaction-landscape and its actual and invented inhabitants, as well as the techniques of its production. Texts, drawings, figures, figurations, methods, and both human and non-human authors weave together the heterogeneous texture of the book’s "new" ecology. In our monographs, "Fauna. Language Arts and the New Order of Imaginary Animals" (2018), "Flora. Language Arts in the Age of Information" (2020), and "Fiction Fiction. Language Arts and the Practice of Spatial Storytelling" (2023, De Gruyter/Edition Angewandte), we explore and map the territory of language arts. This approach manifests, on the one hand, through the transgression of traditional scientific methodologies and a shift in models—from thinking-of-the-other toward thinking-with-the-other, and on the other hand, through the agency of our eponymous characters, Fauna and Flora, who not only title our books but also act as conceptual operators—figures that navigate, perform, and activate the very spaces our texts explore. Applying Michel Serres' methodology of thinking by inventing personae, these characters move within and percolate through the margins of text (written, figural) and space (concrete, fictional), reconfiguring the notion of authorship and placing literary texts and digital drawings within the frame(less) collective of more-than-human and more-than-organic actants.

This exposition contains documentation of the artistic result of Magnhild Øen Nordahls artistic research PhD project Unmaking Abstractions. The exposition also contains the artistic reflection for the same project. On the exposition's landing page the reader can access its different components by clicking different sides of the unfolded cube. The rotating cube in the upper right corner will bring the reader back to the landing page.

Research Paper of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023 MA Interior Architecture (Inside) Public space is defined as “ an area or place that is open and accessible to all people, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, age, or socio-economic level. These are public gathering spaces such as plazas, squares and parks”. Public spaces that bring together a great diversity of people are therefore designed as “zero friction” spaces, but when in use, people will experience friction. This research paper focuses on how one constructs territories within the public realm and how this can both foster participation for those who can identify themselves with the activities within the territory and others who do not -to depart from a space. This creates fear tendencies against the unknown and in order to maintain a certain behavioral control, objects are being modified, removed and designed to prevent certain behaviors and user groups from territorializing certain spaces from happening. One territorial action is found in the action of skateboarding. Skateboarders do not only foresee opportunities for action through the use of affordances within the public realm, but also territorialize the space through extractions, additions, and public interactions for their action to be possible. Skateboarding might be considered an action that excludes certain user groups from using the public space if territorialized by the skating community. Yet, on the contrary, skateboarders see opportunities for action within the public realm through affordances that might not be obvious to the naked eye and therefore creates another level of interaction and encounters which may alter the behavioral corollary within the space. If skateboarders see the user value of public space through affordances and claim elements within the space through action, does their territorialization of the space actually negatively impact the space? Or do they introduce a new user value of the space that furthers behavioral actions and introduces new encounters? Therefore, this research paper reflects on how a skateboarder's perspective of the public realm criticizes how we use space and reveal new design potentials for a multifunctional public space.

Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022 Master Photography & Society As photographers we make, sell and consume digital images, and the digital space and its audiences are growing exponentially. But every conversation on circulating photography centres on the object, about books or exhibitions. It seemed like there are images, and there is photography. Why are the two diverging? Radio evolved into podcasts. TV turned into TikTok. This thesis, then, sets out to ask what it is that photography says it does, or thinks it does, and what it actually does in the age of the smartphone. Critics love to tell their readers that photography is dead, but for some reason you can find all those same critics cheerfully posting their lunch on Instagram. This thesis is an invitation and a challenge to photography, to admit that things have changed and to embrace this as an opportunity rather than a threat.

Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023 MA Photography and Society This study examines what roles images can play in the disclosure of discipline within the Dutch political settlement known as the polder model. On November 24, 1982, the Accord of Wassenaar formalised the contemporary Dutch socio-economic and political character by adopting a method of corporatist consensus seeking and decision making between capital, the state, and labour called the ‘polder model’. The polder model has its origin in the creation of a key feature of the rationalised Dutch landscape, reclaimed sections of formerly submerged land known as ‘polders’. This study draws a connection between the signing of the Accord of Wassenaar and the historically rooted labour discipline of residents of the artificial landscape of the Netherlands. Incorporating archival material, visual experiments, case studies and descriptions of field visits, this study reflects on the role of the praxis of the image maker through artistic research, and emphasizes the disciplined character of the Dutch landscape. These concerns are examined through discussions of the artificiality of nature in the landscape, the grid, the signing of the Accord of Wassenaar, and invisible labour. Through visual interventions in the materiality of cartographic and national archival material, this study argues for a more broadly-encompassing praxis of the representation of power mechanisms in the artificial Dutch landscape. Through the juxtaposition of different visual interventions in the Dutch landscape, an alternative situational understanding of the position of the viewer in relation to the polder is proposed.