Meet Maria Høgh-Mikkelsen

Design School Kolding is transforming. For this exciting transformation, the school has temporarily relocated from Aagade 10 to Dyrehavevej 116. While our setting has changed, the strong community and shared passion for design within Design School Kolding remains the same.

In the series “New setting, Same people”, members of the institution will give an insight into their part in this community. Today we give you senior lecturer and PhD fellow Maria Høgh-Mikkelsen.

What inspires and fascinates you?  

Life. Gardens, transformations, light, passionate people, questions, poetry, dancing bodies, colours, materials, structures, moving curtains, birth, decay. I am chronically curious. My husband says I have a popcorn brain. 

What is your background?

I trained as an art teacher before I studied textile design in Kolding and Man & Well-being at Design Academy Eindhoven. Later I ran my own business, but I was more curious about design processes and artistic experiments than products and sale. So, teaching and research are ideal for me. 

What do you like most about working at Design School Kolding?  

Now I'm doing a PhD on colour using an artistic research practice to explore and discuss colour matters I've pondered over for years. I make experiments, teach students, and engage in conversations about research methods, colour, even about the ‘truth’. And I love it! 

And what are you most excited about while the school is being transformed?  

I quite enjoy the limbo it generates. It feels like a huge creative constraint in my working life; not knowing where to sit, where to find the library or a colleague’s office. I fully embrace the chaos and enjoy letting go of control. It's a bit like when a train stops unexpectedly on a field and the passengers suddenly start talking to each other. The benefit of an interruption. 

What courses do you teach at Design School Kolding?  

I don’t teach so many courses now because of the PhD. But I'm responsible for a six-week colour course on the bachelor programme. It's about colour theory but mostly about colour practice and applied aesthetics. How do we as designers work with colour? How do we understand the relation between colour, matter, form and light? How can we design colours to support the intention of our concepts? 

What do you like most about teaching at Design School Kolding?  

The subject, the questions and the people. That is what teaching is all about for me. Take the colour course for instance; I love the subject of colours. And the questions are crucial: there must be something that I'm deeply curious about myself. Then my teaching becomes alive. And the students are there because they aspired to become designers their whole life, so they are as curious and dedicated as me! 

Stay tuned for more interviews with community members of Design School Kolding.