Vi lærer at tænke ved at tale, handle og være uenige

Studieåret 2026/27 blev skudt i gang med en opfordring til de studerende om at tænke selv, turde være uenige og bruge mødet med materialer, mennesker og idéer aktivt i deres læring. Følgende er Lene Dammand Lunds tale til nye og gamle studerende og medarbejdere.

Welcome, everyone! It's wonderful to see you, wonderful to see campus filling with life again.

In the eye of the storm

In many ways, we find ourselves in the eye of the storm. All around us, debates are raging about geopolitics, the environment, social inequality, and the use of AI has become a major theme we're all forced to deal with.

The Royal Danish Academy is a higher education and research institution. Sometimes people also call that a "knowledge institution".

Knowledge is something you develop by thinking and by talking.

Learning how to think

That is precisely what the staff here at the Academy gathered to reflect on a few weeks ago, at a summer salon. Because AI has, among many other things, turned out to be a lever for reflecting on what it actually means to know something, to think.

Here at the Royal Danish Academy, we need to start talking a great deal more about how knowledge is produced, and about how you, as students, acquire skills and competencies, what kind of thinking, and what kind of "doing" or agency, is required.

A lot of thinking happens perfectly well inside one's own head. I have plenty of good thoughts while cycling out here to Holmen, but I also know that if I don't air those thoughts to others, they tend to spiral in on themselves.

In order to think, we need to talk, to exchange ideas and dare to disagree. That's how we develop our thinking. As the philosopher who visited us at the staff salon provocatively put it: we can't actually think, we are constantly practising learning how to think.

By engaging in discussions, we help each other to learn how to think.

Here at the Royal Danish Academy, we practise teaching each other how to think within the fields of architecture, design and conservation. That may be our most important contribution to society.

Academic freedom

Hold on to that! At its core, that is what the academic freedom you've been granted here is about.

To truly practise thinking, you have to think a great deal, and you have to do it completely freely, without constraints, including the constraint of everyone else thinking something different.

AI and our capacity to think

AI is fantastic at helping us think, but something we've all become more aware of lately is that it can also limit our capacity to think. We grow lazy, we ask AI to do the work instead of doing it ourselves, and worse still, when AI has done the work for us, it doesn't lodge itself in our memory the way it should. We risk running around like headless chickens, not making use of our academic freedom.

What's interesting, and truly special, about our programmes, and about our artistic research and part of our research is that we combine knowledge and experience very actively and deeply. I will get back to that.

From knowledge to insight

Knowledge isn't just knowledge. There's a world of difference between knowledge you've worked hard to acquire and knowledge handed to you by AI. The latter fades quickly; the former stays with you. Some even call knowledge fetched from AI "learned helplessness," based on the idea that we lose the ability to acquire knowledge ourselves.

But whether knowledge sticks or fades, having it doesn't necessarily mean you exist in the world any differently. We know we have a climate crisis, but that doesn't mean we necessarily do anything about it. Insight, by contrast, and the courage to act, requires that you engage with the world around you. Once you've done that, you exist in the world differently; you think differently.

I can increase my knowledge of the world using nothing but my brain (and my eyes), but if I want true insight, I need to do something that involves the rest of my body too.

Learning through materials

In an artistic learning environment we work physically with materials in our studios and in our workshops. We're not simply realising ideas that already exist. The material is an active participant in the process of understanding.

When conservation students work with objects from museums, when students of architecture work with models, when students of design work with materials, those objects push back. They open up possibilities. They surprise. They reveal flaws and potential.

That shapes the student's, and the researcher's, attention and judgement. Insight is created in that process, and learning is at its very best when it builds on, and is continually supplemented by, knowledge, ideally knowledge you've worked hard to earn.