When design becomes science: New professor at the Royal Danish Academy

“A letter is not just a letter.” Sofie Beier is Denmark’s first design professor with a professional background in design.

Sofie Beier has just taken up her position as professor at the Royal Danish Academy, marking a historic shift: She is the first person in Denmark to be both a trained designer and to have attained the title of professor on an academic research basis.

Sofie Beier is Professor and Head of the Centre for Visibility Design, where she researches how we read, navigate and interact with design. Her work lies at the intersection of design, psychology, technology and the natural sciences – challenging the notion of design as something intuitive and subjective.

Design is not about gut feelings

As a researcher, Sofie Beier works with design – not as a matter of taste, gut feeling or personal preference.

‘As a researcher, I work within the natural science research paradigm. This means that we isolate variables, bring them into a laboratory setting and investigate them systematically,’ she explains.

At the Centre for Visibility Design, the research group works across disciplines including design, psychology, linguistics and engineering. Design questions are formulated as research questions, and solutions are tested through measurements, experiments and data collection.

When a letter is not just a letter

One key area of focus is typography and reading: how letterforms, spacing, contrast and typographic layout affect our ability to decode text – whether we are beginning readers, people with visual impairments or people with reading difficulties.

‘We bring different disciplines together and ask questions driven more by a curiosity about design than by the disciplines our staff come from. We challenge assumptions in the design industry about what does and does not work. For example, there is a tendency for a typeface to appear every now and then that supposedly fixes dyslexia. So far, there is no evidence that any of them work as intended,’ says Sofie Beier.

Rather than looking for universal quick fixes, the centre investigates specific mechanisms – such as crowding, a phenomenon in which letters merge together in peripheral vision, the part of our visual field on which we are not directly focused.

‘Crowding matters when we read at a distance or when we read in our visual periphery. Letters merge together more there than they do in our central field of vision.’

A recurring theme in Sofie Beier’s research is that design has a far greater impact on how we understand the world than we realise.

‘A letter is not just a letter.’

She explains how small variations in typography can have a major impact on legibility. One concrete example is that letters such as e and c are easier to read when their openings are larger rather than more closed.

‘It is not design “for design’s sake”, but design based on documented effects.’

Testing rather than assuming

One of the central messages of Sofie Beier’s work is that designers cannot rely on their own assumptions.

‘Designers are biased when it comes to their own work. You have to test it, because you cannot see your own blind spots. Many designers assume that users have the time, peace of mind and desire to familiarise themselves with new ways of interacting. That is not the reality.’

Systematic user testing and empirical methods are central to Sofie Beier’s research. Design should not merely look right – it has to work in the real world, for real people, with their limitations, habits and expectations.

‘This applies to everything from reading on screens and signage to the augmented reality glasses of the future, where text will have to be legible against an unpredictable real-world background without compromising safety or orientation.’

A new understanding of design

Sofie Beier’s appointment as professor is not only a personal recognition. It reflects a broader development in the field of design, where design is increasingly understood as a knowledge-based discipline. It is the culmination of a long academic journey – and a clear indication that design today is not merely about form, but about knowledge, evidence and human behaviour.

‘Design research as a field is relatively young in Denmark. Higher artistic design education programmes were accredited in 2010, and Sofie Beier is therefore the first person to have followed the entire research career path. It is therefore an enormous achievement and deeply impressive that Sofie Beier has reached such a high level. Sofie’s research, her approach to design and the Centre for Visibility Design are outstanding examples of how design can address complex challenges at the intersection of design practice at the highest artistic level, evidence-based methods and the latest technology. I hope we will see many more follow in her footsteps in the future - we have a great many talented researchers at the Royal Danish Academy,’ says Dean of Design Mathilde Aggebo.

For Sofie Beier, design is not about what is “cool”, but about how people actually behave in the world, how we filter information, what we notice and what we overlook. And how design can support us in situations where our cognitive resources are limited.

As she puts it:

‘We cannot analyse every chair, every interface and every sign we encounter. Design has to communicate with us clearly, immediately and on the basis of evidence.’