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Associate Professor
Institute of Design and Visual Interaction
Maria Mackinney
I work with Comfort Design bringing together ethnographic, participatory and visual methods to develop knowledge and accessible tools for improving emotional wellbeing and human connection. I am also a curator and a student counselor (SPS)
Maria Mackinney
Comfort Design
I am interested in how visual design can support comfort in an accessible way combining ethnography, visual inquiry and occasionally physiological testing.
My current research looks at how engaging with intervals can have restorative effect providing embodied experiences of calm, peace or breath. Interval derives from the Latin intervallum meaning the space between rows of stakes in a fortification or wall. This image of protection later broadened in meaning as in-between spaces not as absence but as something creating pulse. balance or tension for instance in music, architecture and graphic design.
The main case in this effort is Christiansborg Riding Grounds that is studies as a restorative environment through photograph and textile print.
Other projects within Comfort Design include studies of the how visual design may activate our parasympathetic nervous system through the principle "glimmers" and how we might measure how clothes make us feel.
Intervals are also considered through the idea of white - from the role of the white page in type design to the identity narratives of the photo album, album meaning 'white' in Latin.
Comfort Design: Intervals as restorative interiors
Access to regenerative environments in our daily lives has become increasingly important with the rise in wellbeing concerns in an era of global unrest. The project reframes everyday smartphone photography as an embodied way of engaging with intervals, shifting focus from image capture to practices of attention and perception. Bringing together autoethnographic and artistic methods, the project explores how repeated engagement with specific environments can build visual practices of wellbeing.
Images: Archive photos, Christiansborg Riding Grounds, n.d.
Informed by environmental psychology (Kaplan and Kaplan 1989), the research explores how regenerative qualities emerge through the way individuals actively experience and revisit environments over time. By approaching photography as a relational and embodied practice, the research points toward new ways of shaping and engaging with interior environments through accessible visual tools that are attuned to everyday interaction in urban life.
By reconsidering Kaplan and Kaplan’s four components for restorative environments - being away, extent, fascination and compatibility - the project revisits a personal, visual archive of iPhone11 images taken of the Riding Grounds at Christiansborg Palace in Copenhagen over a period of four years. Focus is on intervals as seen in the semi-enclosed archways as interior spaces and the repetitive patterns of the colonnades. Intervals are considered here to be potentials to hold space, breath, pause and rhythm to create our own safe spaces.
Comfort Design: Layering interiors
An extension of the ethnographic study of the Riding Grounds is an ongoing visual inquiry into intervals through layering within and between photos as an effort to allow for moments of restoration. I work with multiple exposures using an analogue Holga 120, a toy camera developed in Hong Kong in the 1980s. The camera is known for its low-fi unpredictability including light leaks. The same negatives are used repeatedly in various processes such as heat press and Risograph print in a series of studies on embodied interiors through visual and material engagement.
A step further in the project is visually and conceptually working on de-authoring interiors by exploring sites of power such as the Riding Grounds. Image, text and the empty space of the page form an interior for experimenting with erosion of authorship in a movement towards embodied, relational conditions. Using ephemera, heat press, re-assemblage, emulsion lift and Riso print, the research brings together academic and visual methods rooted in graphic design traditions.
The experiments are conducted in collaboration with staff at Textile Workshop, Printing Workshop and Photography Workshop at The Royal Danish Academy.
I am currently exploring how intervals may be experiences across cultural settings. Generously funded by the Sasakawa Foundation, I will be conducting fieldwork in Japan in November 2026 as part of a reconsideration of the seminal work of architect Arata Isozaki (1931–2022) in the exhibition "MA: Space-Time in Japan" at Cooper-Hewitt Museum in 1979. The catalogue is a conceptual companion in studying intervals as MA, a Japanese term often described as the the intentional gap between musical notes that creates a rhythm, a pause in a conversation or transitional areas that allow the mind to breathe.
I will be using RISO Printer-Duplicator - also known as the Risograph - as my primary visual tool of exploration with focus on themes of copy/duplication, repetition and tracing.
The project is a collaboration with Kyoto Institute of Technology to explore how cultural history informs perceptions of intervals specifically in terms of the relation between space and time, active emptiness, and perceptual engagement.
Images "MA: Space-Time in Japan", Arata Isozaki.
Comfort Design: Reconsidering white space as emotional interval in type design
Variable parametric fonts, popularised in recent years, represent a shift in the way we design with text. This development allows designers to adjust at the glyph, word, and layout levels. The shift brings new attention to the role of white space in typography as a passive absence. Writing or designing type is often considered to be about adding black marks to a white page, be it digital or physical. This critical commentary aim to shift the perspective by looking at the blanks around the word specifically in relation to the expanding field of parametric fonts, as a way of organizing space when designing. Rather than a primary focus on optimization of readability, this commentary argue that bringing attention to for instance pause, rhythm and intensity as embodied dimensions in type design may inform the reading experience with more pleasure that in turn may motivate reluctant readers.
The project is a collaboration with cognitive researcher Hector Mangas, Typotheque https://www.typotheque.com/authors/hector-mangas.
Image: Lowercase a set in Zed Display Variable, designed by Peter Biľak (Typotheque), with different instances of the weight axis, from narrow to extra wide. As part of the ongoing research with Hector Mangas on variable typography.
Comfort design: Glimmers
The word photography is from Greek meaning light (phos) and to draw (graphé). Drawing with light relates to exposure and development as a technical process but it also relates to a physiological process. Glimmer, as a twinkle of light, is a principle from neuropsychology referring to moments of joy, comfort or calm that ‘spark’ the parasympathetic nervous system, what is popularly referred to as state rest and digest. Through workshops with external partners and first-year students at The Royal Danish Academy, the project explores how photography may allow us to notice and engage with glimmers as a method of training ourselves to signal to the nervous system that we are safe.
Image from workshop with first-year students at the Royal Danish Academy, Design and Visual Interaction, 2025
Comfort design: Glimmers
Data was collection from a series of workshops with Skolen for Skabertrang (The School of Creative Urge), a program in Copenhagen for adults with mental health concerns https://www.skolenforskabertrang.dk. The process involved three phases: Curating glimmers from personal photo archives, photo walks, and assembling small zines for a final exhibition (see image above). Attention was on how images registered as glimmers as an embodied experience and exploring visual patterns.
Comfort design: Glimmers
Workshops have been held for instance: Digitally Engaged Learning (DEL) conference organized by London College of Art, Penn State University and Parsons New School (https://www.delconference.org/2022/about.html), Olivia Danmark that provide student counseling services for higher education (https://oliviadanmark.dk/ydelser/sps), and first-year students at The Royal Danish Academy, Institute of Design and Visual Interaction.
The findings have been shared through papers and conference presentations.
Images from workshops with Skolen for Skabertrang, First-year students at The Royal Danish Academy, Institute of Design and Visual Interaction and DEL workshop.
The term album comes from the Latin word albus, meaning “white” or “whiteness”. In ancient Rome, it referred to a blank white tablet used to record official events. Later, this evolved to describe blank books for collecting autographs, stamps, stickers, coins and music. Since the late 1800s, a photo album has often been understood as a collection of staged images of the family. The photo album is essentially about organizing images into a visual narrative of the family. While the format has moved from physical books of analogue images to more dispersed digital platforms, the visual narratives are still formative in communicating to identity and belonging.
Confort design: Re-authoring the Album
This practice-based project explores how everyday photography can serve as a creative tool for emotional self-regulation, identity expression, and empowerment. Drawing on Michael White’s narrative therapy, especially the processes of externalizing problems and re-authoring personal stories, the project examines how image-making can help individuals process emotions through embodied reflection. The approach rests on the field of therapeutic photography established by Judy Weiser in the 1970s. Weiser argued that snapshots may be seen as self-portrait, acting as a mirror reflecting back on moments, moods, people, places specifically in photo albums.
